


the mother we share

by spikeface



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - Beauty and the Beast, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Slavery, Captivity, F/M, M/M, Slavery, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 19:58:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2824319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spikeface/pseuds/spikeface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dark Beauty and the Beast AU, in which hunters are an informal but powerful class.  Six years after taking him, Kate decides her pet can have one of his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to primavera for the many edits and feedback. Thanks also to the wonderful canistakahari, who was incredibly nice about providing cheerleading and ideas. <3
> 
> I am really super not kidding about those warnings. You've been so warned!

_proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris._  
it is typical of human nature to hate whom you have harmed. — tacitus

 

"I've got a present for you."

Usually when Derek's a good boy, Kate scratches behind his ears, rubs his belly, ties him up in her bedroom. He gets hard at the memory of her cunt on his mouth, choking him.

Derek is a good boy these days, mostly.

"I thought you might like something special. Full moon's rising — and I know you've been _itching_ to hunt."

Derek rumbles.

"Get naked or you'll miss out."

Her eyes are black — sweat beads between her breasts — but she's still.

If Derek could take something of hers, it'd be that.

Instead, he strips, tightens the muzzle laced with wolfsbane snug around his jaw, snaps it to his electric collar, and crouches down into the cage that divides the grounds from the rest of Kate's estate. The moon has been pulling at him for days — a ratlike gnawing agony — and he finally, _finally_ gives in.

Kate pulls the lever, opens the door.

Derek is drooling at the smell of her, wants to turn around and tear out her belly and lick her uncoiled guts.

But Derek can barely make himself look back at her.

He wants to run, but then he smells his reward: human, male, sweat, old clothes, laundry soap and cold mud. Derek knows exactly which corner of the creek he fell into, because he knows every inch of this place. 

This human is his.

\+ + +

He picks up the human's tracks minutes later, closes in — finds him scrambling clumsy up the side of a hill.

Derek snarls.

The human startles, searches for the noise. He's half-blind, even in the light of the moon, and Derek can hear his heart pounding, smell his bile. Little by little he herds the human into the field on the other side of the hill, gives him a good head start and then pelts after him. His claws rake the earth and he can feel his blood in his ears, his heart in his chest. His body is working for him and the only other human here is a frightened sack of meat. 

The whole world is tinted red and it feels so _good_.

Then the human disappears.

The scent darts left and then right and then vanishes at the edge of the field. Derek hunts in circles, nose pressed to the ground, before his ears prick at the sound of _shuffle-breath-crack_ and he looks up.

The human has climbed a tree.

It's an old oak with strong branches, too big to tear down — a hiding tree, a hidden tree that smells like magic, kept the human's scent away from him until he looked up.

He reaches for the lowest branch, the one the human must have climbed, but it snaps under his weight. He leaps, sinks his claws into a higher branch, and that breaks too. Derek paces the tree, snarling, tears up loam and roots with his claws, needs to get to the meat that belongs to him. 

The human is dripping sweat and just out of his reach. He's shouting something, but Derek only hears the stubborn victory in it.

He digs and claws at the tree the whole night, furious in the cold wet dirt.

Hours later he sits down and begins to howl.

\+ + +

"Getting slow in your old age."

It's morning. Kate is here. Derek rolls to his feet instead of scrambling. Kate has a gun, and a little twist to her eyebrows. Could be good news or bad.

Derek shifts his weight.

"At least you treed him." She aims the rifle up, shouts up: "Time to come down, little man."

"Tempting — but I'll pass." The human's voice is scratchy.

Kate fires, hits six inches from where the human is huddled up. The branch splinters and the human falls ten feet, lands hard on his knees yet still tries to sprint away on legs shaky with sleep.

Derek leaps after him, half changed. He catches him in seconds, has him pinned down in half that, hot and shaking under him. He bends down with teeth for the blood spurt and — 

"Stop!"

Derek shakes over the boy's soft hot throat, the tender wrinkles under his jaw, stubble over the rubber cord of his trachea. Derek can see his leaping artery, could nuzzle it with his teeth.

"Let him up."

Derek lets go, but only just. The human scrabbles to his feet, hands up, elbows clenched narrowly over his chest.

He's a kid.

A weedy stick-legged kid, covered in dirt and breathing so hard he's going to pass out any second and he'd _still_ managed to outrun Derek.

Kate cocks her head over her shoulder to indicate the tree. "Someone tell you to run there?"

"What? Yes? No — what the hell are you talking about? Look, you don't want to kill me — I'm — my dad's the sheriff. I'm friends with Allison, just ask her and —"

Kate squints at him and he snaps his jaw shut with a loud click of teeth. "You don't seem like a man with a plan."

He's nothing — skinny, dirty, young. 

Young as Derek was, once.

Derek's still swollen with the change, claws flicking restlessly, muscles knotted tight and twinging. His jaw is so clenched it hurts, flat ape teeth grinding. He hates the human, can barely stand under the weight of it.

Kate grabs the kid by the scruff, hurls him towards Derek.

Derek traps him with claws, tightens against his wriggling. One hand goes around his neck and his heart is beating so fast, birdlike. He smells good.

"Dad will be there tomorrow with the drop." Kate keeps the rifle ready, hip cocked. She's wet; Derek can smell that, too. His grip tightens until the kid whimpers. "He's yours until then. Don't kill him."

"Mine?" Derek asks, voice caught in his chest. He wants to know if Kate is giving him what he thinks, adrenaline pumping through him heady at the idea.

She smiles and he knows he's right.

\+ + +

Kate wants to be thanked, loves it when her little puppy is _grateful_ , and three hours later his knees are sore and all his joints are stiff from electricity and his jaw aches and his tongue aches and he wants to fuck something.

The kid is right there, in the cage in the corner of Derek's bedroom, all dirty.

He lifts his head when the door rattles open and Derek's pushed in.

"Hey," he says, sends the word out like a fish hook, like he thinks they're going to _converse_.

Derek snarls.

It makes the cage rattle, and the kid jumps backward, like he had last night. Derek hazes red again, but he doesn't want that, wants to see everything. He opens the cage and the kid scrambles against the back of it.

It won't give. Derek knows.

He watches as the kid feels the clawmarks he'd left on the wall. He's distracted, looks back, and Derek pounces, tears him out and throws him down. 

The kid lands hard on his right shoulder with a loud pop. He screams, clutches at it.

Derek's cock is hard, has been hard for nearly three hours. 

He grinds down against the kid and it sizzles from the gut up — the kid under him and squirming and Derek on top, Derek in control. The human is helpless and he knows it and he's afraid, _he's_ terrified.

Derek licks the sour sweat off his neck.

The kid is kicking, punching, grunting through his gritted teeth but he's exhausted, weak, right arm hanging limply by his side, making him scream whenever he jerks it. Derek pulls the kid's clothes off him, tears them apart because he can and he wants to and he can do what he wants.

The kid really starts to panic when he's nearly naked, all pale and sweat-smelling. Derek pins him down and licks his neck in long swipes. The kid is babbling. Derek isn't listening and doesn't care, so he puts one hand flat on his chest and the other in his mouth, two fingers and a warning, "If you bite me, I'll bite you back."

The human is shuddering, panting, swallows hotly around Derek's fingers.

Derek had done that too, he remembers. 

He has a wide mouth, gags easily but doesn't fight when Derek pushes his fingers in, fucks his tight throat. His tongue is dry, his throat soft. Derek is mesmerized by the smell of him, the ropey saliva on his knuckles.

The human is clutching the wrist of Derek's other hand, the one pressed against his chest. He's either too smart or too afraid to fight, but he can't help wringing his hand around him, like the fake burns Laura used to give him when he was little.

Derek jerks his hands away.

The human tries to crawl towards the bathroom but he's slow, shambles on his knees, clutching his injured arm. He writhes frantically when Derek picks him up and puts him on the bed and ties him down with a belt. Derek wonders if he'd been this pathetic when he was drugged. 

He can't remember.

Kate leaves lube in the drawer with the rest of her toys.

The human is kicking fruitless at the sheets when Derek turns back, trying to pull himself up onto his knees, to turn over to face Derek instead of the headboard. "Come on," he says, voice reedy but pushing. "Listen to me, just, no, no, just listen to me, I know you can hear me, I know you're human. I have to get out of here and I need—no, no, please, _please_ , just _listen to me_ —"

Derek hates it.

He gropes around, finds a torn sleeve and ties it around the kid's head, through his gnashing teeth. The kid's jaw works angrily, trying to push the gag out. He's still shouting, losing it, rubbing his cheek against his shoulder to try to get it off.

His words are now all trapped up in his chest, low and desperate.

Derek shudders. His cock is going to explode. It's red and angry when he finally strips, twitching when he jerks it with lube. It's cold and he wants warm, climbs onto the bed and pins the human's hips down and looks at the tiny hole he's going to put his cock in.

Kate's fucked him like this with toys, made him watch once. He hadn't thought it would happen, that his own hole would open like that, and even though he can remember it, remembers her toy sinking all the way in, it still doesn't feel possible. 

Now appeal erases horror, the memory upside down.

Derek's cock slips down to the kid's balls when he first tries to push in, his cock messy with lube and the kid kicking and wriggling, his hole so tight. Derek pins him down and spreads him wide and _pushes_ , slashes in and has to pause, the hot slick suck of the human's hole on his cock. It feels so fucking good, better than anything—than Kate's cunt, than her mouth—because this is all his, his to hurt and control. He's dizzy with it, blinded, shoves in the rest of the way. He's so deep in him, balls pressed against tight skin.

He bends and sniffs, wonders if the human smells different now that Derek's inside him.

He smells good. Derek licks the soft nape of his neck, runs his nose along the hot sweet hair there.

The kid shudders, breath coming in labored pants. From this angle Derek can see his left hand, clenching the pillow, his knuckles bone white.

Derek wraps one hand around the human's hips, covers the human's hand with the other. He can't see it now, but he can still feel it, skin tight and muscles seizing. But then he doesn't care anymore, humping into his tight hot hole, the only sound the wet smack of Derek's hips against the kid's and the unrelenting ragged noises Derek fucks out of him. 

He wonders what words they'd be, without the gag.

Derek used to make a lot of noise.

He always comes quickly after Kate has teased and prodded him to the brink of it ten times over, but it's never been as good as this, grinding his hips down, the human pinned flat to the mattress, cock shoved deep inside. Derek's teeth are bared but not biting, not yet.

He falls down, half blind from orgasm, and the kid makes another noise— _oof_ , the air pushed out of him. 

It's unfitting, like Derek was a couch he'd sat on harder than expected.

Derek licks his ear. He unties his wrists.

Orgasm has left him wag-tail sated. His eyelids are heavy, hands like paws, but he feels like floating too. He sits up, panting. 

Suddenly he kid gags _hard_ , panicking. Derek hauls him up, rips the gag off with a claw, dumps him over the toilet just in time to watch him heave.

He kneels behind him, watches his ribs contract.

The kid's naked, ass streaked with come and a little blood, smears of lube. The air is filled with the smell of vomit, sharp and new, but Derek can smell his own come, bends down and inhales. He can smell himself and the kid and a new smell, both of them, the way his come changes when it's _in_ him.

The kid has gone still, the barest quiver in his thighs.

He leans over him, flushes, pulls the kid to his feet and pushes him over to the sink. He watches him splash his face with one hand, sip shallow at the water only to spit it out. 

He'd do it all night if Derek let him, because Derek had done it all night, scrubbed his skin until it was raw and then sat in the shower even after the hot water ran out.

He turns off the faucet, stares at the kid's dazed, empty face he can see while standing behind him. There's a cut on his cheek, bleeding sluggishly, where Derek had sliced through the gag.

Utterly absorbed, Derek watches the kid stumble to the doorway of the bathroom. Slowly, jaw rigid, he grips the doorframe with his right hand and _slam_ —he screams, his shoulder shuddering uselessly, muscles coiled. Jaw shaking with effort, he tries again—and fails miserably, fingers slipping. Derek comes up behind him, chest to back, presses his hand over the kid's onto the door. 

The kid flinches hugely, shouts when it makes his shoulder seize.

Derek waits.

Kate likes to watch him when it hurts to move. She's never held him like this, never helped him.

The kid pants it out and then braces himself, feet slipping against the concrete floor, until finally his shoulder _pops_ again. The kid collapses against the doorway, sweat running down his temples. 

He looks up. His face falls when he sees Derek.

Derek's guts clench, hot and shivery.

He doesn't fight when Derek pushes him down onto the tiles, so Derek isn't rough. He isn't angry anymore, just curious, wants to smell and take his time. He licks the kid's asshole, raw and swollen from being fucked, down to his balls, drawn tight and wrinkled against him. Derek likes licking but Kate's worn him out already, so he licks the come that's dribbled out until his cock is hard again, and then he pushes in.

It's sweeter, this time, when he can go slow and make it last. The kid is barely moving except when Derek jostles him, makes him whine, breathless.

Derek wraps one arm around his hips to pull him in, snakes the other under his armpit and then over his neck, holding him bowed and still. The kid's good hand keeps slipping across the floor, too tuckered to hold him up.

Derek comes with his eyes closed, nose pressed against the dip in the back of the kid's head, right at the base of his skull.

He stands up but the kid doesn't bother, hunkered down on the floor, legs curled under him. He covers the back of his neck. His shoes are still on, shredded old sneakers with laces gone grey. Derek hadn't bothered to take them off. He does it now, wanting to see all of him while he can. The kid has long feet, red heels, a scar over one ankle.

Gerard will kill him tomorrow.

Derek picks him up, half-pulls and half-carries him back to the bed. The kid digs in his heels at the last second but it's only a breath of fight—there and gone again. Derek pulls him down onto the bed with him and shushes him, pets the soft fuzz of hair on his head because he likes touch when he's come and the kid can't hurt him for it. He pulls him close, the kid's back to his chest. 

He listens to his rabbit breaths and waits to smell tears.

\+ + +

He startles—pins the kid down by reflex, hand hard around his neck. But the kid is still naked, unarmed. Derek lets go slowly, lets him draw in whooping lungfuls of air.

They'd gone to bed early, and it's only dawn now, the light beginning to stream in through the high window. The kid looks different even in pale light: freckles Derek hadn't seen before, more bruises. His shoulder is swollen, dark with blood.

He's something new to look at.

"I —" the kid starts, chokes off.

Derek knows that choke, remembers what he had wanted and what he'd needed to say and unable to make himself.

"What?" he prompts—gentler than Kate had been, not mocking.

"Can I take a shower?"

"No." He smells like outside, like Derek's come, and he's warm everywhere, and he's going to die soon. Derek wants to have him while he can.

"What?" The kid sounds genuinely confused. "Why not?"

Derek growls.

The kid's mouth pulls to the side, terrified. He quiets down, grunts when Derek pulls him closer but doesn't fight. Derek lazes, warmer than he usually is, cock hard but not urgently.

It's a few hours later when the kid stirs again, the light a little brighter through the window. He looks paler. His lips are red and ragged at the ends where the gag had rubbed.

"Can I get some water?" the kid asks, quiet like he figures this will probably be denied too.

Derek's grip tightens.

_Thirsty, baby?_

He kicks down the sheets, takes the kid by the arm and leads him to the bathroom, starts the shower running and gives him a shove towards it. He obeys easily, exhausted. For long seconds he's not looking at Derek at all, not even hesitantly, his face in the spray, eyes closed. He bends his head under the water and lets it run down his body.

Derek watches him, curtain pushed to the side. He can smell blood, although not much.

He listens to the kid gulp down water and thinks he doesn't even know what thirst is, that he should be grateful Derek didn't make him bargain for it.

Kate likes to watch him bathe sometimes, when she's in one of her moods. Derek can always identify it, although he'll never understand it; she watches him for days at a time, in a fog. She rarely touches him but the watching is worse: all the time, sleepless. There are no curtains when she gets like that, no blankets, no clothes. He's freezing for days.

The kid takes a long time, but he comes out before Derek has to say something. Derek hands him a towel, watches him huddle in it and dry himself off as best he can. He's covered in goosebumps.

Derek thinks about that in the shower, hard again. He touches himself, so hot he doesn't notice when the water goes cold. He's still feverish, and everything will end quick enough, as soon as they bring in the food. The walls are soundproof, but he imagines he can hear the grunts who work for the Argents moving boxes, muttering curses like they always do. 

It's new, the urgency. All Derek has is time.

He finds the kid in the kitchen, still under the towel, looking through the spoons.

"Don't bother." There's nothing there that would make a good weapon, even after Kate gave him things to cook and cook with instead of dog food on the floor.

He earned them.

The kid whirls around, holding up a wooden mixing spoon in front of him like a shield. "Look—look—I don't have a lot of time—don't you want to get out of here? I can—I can help you get—I know another werewolf—Scott McCall, have you heard of him? I'm only here because I was helping him and I—listen to me, you have to listen. I have to get out of here."

The towel keeps slipping. Derek can see his tight belly, narrow legs. He remembers being sixteen and always hungry, skin stretched tight over bone.

That was a long time ago. "No one gets out."

Gerard is stormy: unpredictable but always cruel. The kid will die, and Derek will go back into the cardboard box of his life, and until then he'll do what he wants.

He grabs the spoon, puts it back in the drawer exactly where it belongs. Everything in the rooms has an order.

Only the kid is out of place, dripping messy over the scratched concrete floor of the kitchen. 

Derek can't look away from him.

His knees are still pink from last night on the floor. Derek is going to hurt them worse now, and human wounds linger so long.

He'll be quick.

He's naked, and hard, and it must be obvious what he wants, but the kid still stares at him with a panicked blank.

"I'll bite," he threatens after Derek has boxed him in and pushed him down.

Derek shows long teeth. "So will I."

The kid's hot breath on his cock tightens every muscle. Kate doesn't do this very often, and when she does he's always tied up and squirming, or with the finger-wagging warning that if he moves, there will be _trouble_.

The kid barely gags, glass eyed with pain and so hot around his cock. His shoulders are so knotted they nearly touch, arched back with the rigid need to run.

Derek cups his hand around the soft fuzzed bone of the kid's skull and pulls him in. The kid doesn't fight, unblinking, coughs around Derek's cock and sucks redfaced, reflexive, hairless throat swallowing. The red creeps down his naked chest, still wet and shivering in the cool air. Derek growls at the inaction, warning, settles one threatening thumb above the kid's brow bone, close enough to pet his eyebrow. The other holds his head close while the kid sucks hard and Derek fucks his mouth harder, and it's so fucking good. 

This throat is his until he fills it, and then the kid will have his come in him until he dies. 

He batters the back of the kid's throat but doesn't push past it, content to let the kid suck at him messily, dripping drool down his chin, gagging and coughing and now trying, so urgent, to make him come. 

The room hazes red, claws out. Everything feels so good, tight everywhere. He's afraid, remembering, but it feels good too, like it always does. He's in control, _he's_ in control—

The kid's teeth scrape his cock, a sudden jab of bright hot pain.

He clenches, grips tight, and comes hard—deep down on the first spurt, but then he pulls back, lets him taste it at the back of his throat. The kid falls back as soon as Derek lets go, heaving coughs—clutching his eye—is screaming. 

It's bleeding, a stream down the kid's face, streaked with thick globs of white. The kid curls both hands over it, long fingers spattered with blood. He reeks of adrenaline, is panting so hard he's going to pass out, tight gasps that make his ribs flutter. Derek must have scratched him where his thumb had been before.

It will all be over soon and it doesn't matter but Derek crouches down anyway. It smells good. New.

"Let me see."

"Don't!" The kid lurches back, swipes at Derek with one wet hand. Derek catches it easy, bats the other out of the way. The kid ducks his head down in that last sick need to hide but Derek can still see the ragged claw marks streaking down from his eyebrow to his cheekbone. 

The white of his eye runs sluggish down his cheek.

It would heal, given mercy and time. They have neither.

He smells the hunters outside the door.

\+ + +

He brings the kid to the bed, ignoring his wriggling, and ties down his wrist on his good arm. He gags him too, unsure what the Argents will find a threat.

Derek smells Gerard halfway down the hall, hears the old man stiffness of his walk. There's Chris, too, and another man, who keeps his shotgun loaded at Derek as soon as he comes in the door. He's one of the ever changing lackeys the Argents keep around, unlanded drifter hunters who do their dirty work. They're always the most nervous, the most trigger happy, and the grabbiest for Derek's food.

Derek eats from his enemies' hands.

Chris is the easiest: he doesn't take any of what he's delivering, and doesn't stay longer than he has to. Derek has earned, over the years, a sometime hello or goodbye. Once he paused at the doorway, when Derek had been very low after a go with Kate, sick enough to huddle in the cage.

"Stiles?"

Chris starts towards the bed, already halfway through tucking his gun into his belt—only pauses at Gerard's hand on his shoulder. "Help an old man and bring in the supplies, Chris? My back's been bothering me lately."

Chris stares, chest puffed with breath, at the bed.

The kid pleads through his gag, the words blurred but obvious. One hand is on his torn eye. It's still bleeding, the other slitted and tearing.

Chris straightens, nods, always a beta. He starts to carry in boxes towards the kitchen. There's more than usual. Derek guesses what it means, bubbles inside.

The kid lets out a raw, agonized wail.

"Rough night, I see," Gerard says, pleasant. He's holding the remote for the electric collar in his hand.

The kid's—Stiles'—heart rate doubles.

"I was surprised when Kate told me about her little change in plans. She can be so impetuous, to the point of impracticality. A trait you'll recognize, I'm sure."

Derek's claws sink into the wall behind him.

Gerard walks forward, gently unties the gag. The kid is shuddering under him, so obvious, so much blood.

Gerard stays close to him, face pressed near his. "You'll find me much more reasonable. Tell me where your friend is, and I'll let you go."

"Help me," the kid babbles, like he's barely heard. "My eye, _help_ me, I need—get me _out_ of here, get me—"

"If you don't cooperate, I'll leave you with Kate's little pet here until the next drop. Do you really want to go another two weeks with only that for company?"

The kid stares at him, flicking over and away, panting. Derek can _feel_ his fear rattling around in his chest. 

Gerard waits, motionless. Behind him Chris unpacks boxes with one of the men, while the other waits motionless with a gun.

The kid takes a long frayed breath. "Go fuck yourself."

"Suit yourself." Gerard doesn't sound surprised, not even put out. "Mark, why don't you fetch some supplies from upstairs and bandage this poor child's eye and arm. Bring the scissors, too; we'll have to take it out."

The man disappears and returns a few minutes later. He wraps the shoulder while Chris stands at the doorway like a man who'd rather be pacing.

They have to hold him down while they clean up his eye. He fights even when they hold his bad arm, shrieks sharp into the air, hips twisting. Derek can see the worst of the gashes are through his eyebrow, down below his eye in the soft skin above his cheekbone. The eyelid is only grazed, the eye itself now a black bleeding hole in his head.

Derek did that.

Gerard watches serenely until it's finished. "I'll see you in two weeks," he says to Stiles when they're all at the door. Mark and Chris keep their guns trained on Derek. 

Then Gerard stares at him. Derek's learned the hard way to maintain eye contact.

"Be good," Gerard reminds him as Chris tosses him the key to the cage. "Or I'll have to skin you again."

Derek shivers, hating himself for it, remembering.

\+ + +

He shoves the kid towards the table and makes oatmeal.

Derek thinks about it as he eats his breakfast: the sound of someone else with him, chewing while he chews. He thinks about the last time he shared a meal with someone—the morning his family died. 

He stares long enough that the kid looks up. No, not the kid: "Stiles?"

His slack face barely twitches. "Stilinski."

_Gotta earn it, puppy._

Derek chews this too.

Then he gets up, turns, walks to the bedroom, goes for the drawer where Kate keeps some of her toys.

He hates showing it's there, more of Kate's unsubtlety: _I keep my toys here. I keep you here. You're a toy._

He picks out a gag.

Stiles jolts as soon as he sees it, backs up towards the sink. "What? No. No, wait, call me whatever you fucking want, I won't talk, all quiet on the Stilinski front, _no_ , just—"

His voice dies when Derek crowds him against the sink, leaning back as far as he can, shuddering every time Derek even breathes on him. 

"Open your mouth."

Stiles squirms, thumps against Derek's chest. Not even Derek was this unfrightening.

Maybe it's because he's little.

Derek puts his fingertips against Stiles' mouth. It's soft.

He extends his claws, lets them rest heavily on Stiles' pale lower lip, pulls against the trembling corner until the skin just begins to tear.

Stiles looks up, hunted, and then down. His lips part, chin tucked toward his chest as he opens his mouth.

It probably hurts to take it. The straps rub against the raw edges of his mouth, already pink and swollen. The ball is in past his teeth, and he starts drooling. Derek can feel a soft push as he ties the straps: Stiles trying ungainly to press it out. He's quick breathing by the time Derek lets go of the buckle, and Derek dimly wonders why. Derek hates gags because he can't bite, but the kid acts like he can't even breathe.

The dumbwaiter rattles.

Right on time.

He leaves Stiles in the kitchen.

There's a muzzle and a syringe in the dumbwaiter, which means he's going for a walk. Five years since Kate started taking him out and he still has to take a deep breath before he puts on the muzzle. It's fucking uncomfortable, pressing down on his tongue so hard he nearly gags, longer teeth impossible.

There's wolfsbane in it anyway, if he tries to bite down. This one won't knock him out, but it stings.

A lot.

The syringe is easier, the effects painless and immediate. He's a little dopey already by the time Kate shows up at the door.

"Ready, stud?" She's in a good mood, playful as she pulls his shirt off and locks his hands behind him.

Derek follows her down the hallway, up the stairs to where her bedroom is, Stiles all but forgotten.

\+ + +

The leash is laid out on Kate's bed, and Derek's long had the fight burned out of him on this one, but he still can't help balking. Kate's nice with him, gets to work before he can really start to panic.

"Shh, shh." She holds him by the straps of the muzzle as she buckles the collar on.

The wolfsbane has really kicked in by the time they arrive. Derek squints at the unfamiliar building.

It's a veterinary hospital.

It smells like sick.

The man inside says he's Dr. Deaton.

Kate takes him to the exam room, ties him to the table. Derek sags against it, unsteady. He's not sick, and Kate hasn't threatened to cut his balls off in a long time. He hasn't been bad, he doesn't think—and Kate always hurts him herself, she promised him that, she _promised_ , and she lies about a lot of things but never about hurt.

"I wanted to reiterate how pleased I am that you agreed to this. You can imagine how rare it is to work with live specimens, and I've never seen a tamed one. Do you mind if I strap him down? I'll drug him of course, but he may struggle. For his own sake, restraining him might be best."

"Knock yourself out."

Dr. Deaton pushes him onto the table and he can't even fight, with his teeth locked down and his hands tied, sluggish from the drug. He falls onto the table and stares at the ceiling, lets himself be stripped and strapped.

The metal table is cold on his back and tied hands.

He hasn't had anything like a doctor since his feet, and Kate had taken him to an actual human hospital.

Outings with Kate usually means he's a sign. He reminds anyone who's blown into town that the Argents don't just kill werewolves, they break them. But that's not what this is.

"I'd love to get the chance to work with the one you're hunting now. I don't want to test your generosity, but if you happen to take the McCall boy alive, would you consider letting me examine him as well?"

"Up to Dad, really. And I can't guarantee I won't shoot that little fucker on sight."

"He certainly deserves it, after all he's put your family through. Is there anything you'd like to say to him before I proceed? He'll be extremely disoriented very soon."

Derek tries to crane his head to where Kate must be. He can hear her and smell her and it's almost enough.

"Nope," Kate says. He can't tell if she's lying, all the sounds blurred together. "Have at 'em."

There's a prick from the syringe in his arm, and ten seconds later he can't understand them when they speak.

Their voices are dull roars, and the lights loom against his eyes. He closes them, but then it's all sensation, and he can't see Kate, can barely smell her with everything else hazing in and out of focus.

He's fine, he wants to tell her, mouths restless against the gag. He hasn't done anything bad; he's been a good boy.

Or maybe he hasn't. He hurt the kid—didn't kill him, really, barely hurt him all things considered, spent the night with someone else in his arms for the first time in six years and maybe—

He can't see Kate from this angle, can't tell if she's angry or smiling or filled with that blankness that makes him want to curl his tail between his legs.

The vet is hurting him. Derek jerks at the straps, but he can't make his limbs work and can barely sense where the pain is coming from anyway. The ceiling is close and far away, blurred and then hyper-focused. He feels like he's two and teething, or the first time he shifted after becoming an Alpha, alone in a whole new body.

It hurts, and the lights are bright, and his mouth is filled with leather and poison.

Derek whines.

Once he starts he can't stop the stream of puppy pleas, but it hurts and he doesn't know where he is or what he did wrong. He can feel his toes curling far away, against the pain, his fingernails against his palms. He wants to bite down—but he can't.

He smells Kate and then he sees her, out of the corner of his eye, above his head. She starts to comb through his hair, nails brushing under the hot straps of the muzzle. Derek draws a shuddering breath and forces himself to relax, to breathe in only her. She's familiar.

He remembers things. A bird landed once on Derek's window, three years ago. He fed it bread until it left, put more out on the sill every day until he ran out early, before the supplies drop. But it never came back.

 _Without pack you are nothing,_ he remembers his mother saying, when he was young and sulking.

He can't hear what Kate's saying but it doesn't matter, the sound of her voice is enough. He remembers a lullaby his mother used to sing; Laura laughing; the first time Kate pet him, when he was seventeen and had just fucked for the first time.

He leans into her hands.

He comes back to himself slowly, the pain easing, and by the time Dr. Deaton undoes the straps, he can understand them again.

"As I suspected, the greater his incapacitation, the faster he heals. I wonder how he compares to non-Alphas, however, or to werewolves who were bitten, rather than born that way."

"Get dressed." Derek shuffles into his pants, inhales the air for heady minutes before he realizes the scent is how wet she is. "Help me get him to the car, will you?"

"Of course."

"Thank you again, Ms. Argent," Dr. Deaton says as Kate gets the car started. "I enjoyed that."

A groggy half hour later, Derek puts together the funny little _blip-thump_ of his heartbeat. 

Dr. Deaton had been lying.

\+ + +

After they get back, Kate doesn't seem in any hurry to shoo him back to his rooms. Derek goes hot.

Kate didn't sit on his cock the last time, so he's pretty sure she will this time, and the prospect has him hard by the time he sits down. She notices as she locks him to the chair, ruffles his hair. She's still haloed in his eyes from the drugs, her hair shimmering.

Derek huffs.

"You were a good boy today." Kate slouches onto the edge of her bed, legs crossed. Derek's cock twitches, his whole body thrumming. The thought of letting her out of his sight again produces an intense anxiety. "How do you like your new toy?"

Derek hazily remembers Stiles. He seems very small and unimportant right now, with Kate near.

He shrugs.

"Did you bite him yet?"

Derek shakes his head. He can smell Kate's cunt, wonders how long she'll drag this out. The teasing gets longer the longer she stays, but she's been gone for a month and back for a day. One of them is going to be naked in minutes.

"Did you hurt him?"

Derek nods. His body is buzzing, the drugs wearing off and blood kicking in. His vision narrows to the soft down blankets of the bed, Kate's crossed legs.

"Did you like it?"

It's getting hard to think. He used to wonder if there was something else in the drugs, something that made him like this, but it's just Kate. 

He shrugs again.

Kate uncrosses her legs, goes over to him and straddles him. Her tits are in his face. He could nuzzle them if he reached. She doesn't have very sensitive nipples, but she'll let him lick them anyway if he's good.

"Did he tell you what he did?"

Derek's not expecting that one—shakes his head before he can think to be wary.

Kate laughs. "It's a good one. They caught him trying to help McCall get out of containment—he's the sheriff's son, so he had access, and after Dad caught him Sheriff Stilinski had to book him himself."

He wonders what Stiles wanted with him. Some people stole werewolves, sold them to private parties. It was a serious crime, and part of the hunters' purview. The sheriff's department had caught a smuggler once, when Derek lived outside, before the fire: five prisoners with him, starved and mutilated. They had been put down immediately. 

Derek had nightmares for a week, ran to his mother and sat in her lap, begged her to take them far away from the Argents' reach.

_If we run, we run forever,_ she had said, staring red-eyed out at the woods. _We're stronger in Beacon Hills._

__He never found out what happened to the smuggler, but he can guess._ _

__Kate rubs back and forth against his cock, her fingers against his scruff where it shows at the edges of the gag. "I hope you keep hurting him, Derek. He deserves it."_ _

__Derek wants to ask if she's going to hurt Stiles too, when she will, why she doesn't want to already._ _

__Then she unzips his fly and he doesn't care anymore._ _

____

\+ + +

She ties him to the bed when she's done and touches his chest. It took Derek years to stop fighting it, but he's learned to pick his battles and Kate mostly doesn't hurt him now. Usually she's content to curl up against his hip and stroke where she pleases. He's lax from coming—inside her this time, his feet clawing into the cold floor as he shoved up as hard as he could.

She's cupping his balls, rolling them gently. Her hands are sure and familiar, and the bed is soft. It's easy to think about nothing, even with his hands and mouth tied. He drifts.

When he looks up again, Kate is maintaining her weapons.

It's one of the few things she'll do for a long time. She's good at it; her guns are all polished to a shine, bowstrings taut, knives so sharp they're almost painless. Even Derek can admire that.

He thinks about the first time he rolled up sore and sluggish and found her sharpening a knife, remembers his panic.

Now it's comforting.

 _Dogs like routine_ , Gerard has mocked him more than once.

"I'm off again." Kate puts down one gun and picks up another. It comes apart so quickly under her hands. "Not sure how long. No rest for the wicked, I guess."

Derek nods. Gerard's son has a family, so Kate gets most of the missions that need moving around. She can be gone for weeks at a time, months.

Kate sighs, looks him up and down, and Derek wonders if she wants to go another round or wants to play with him, or tease him to delirium because she's bored but not horny enough to fuck.

Instead she unlocks him from the bed. "Back you go."

He follows her down, still a little groggy, wanting to yawn and scratch and stretch his arms. Kate's hair is all sex messy, and she walks a little different whenever he's had his cock in her.

Derek is proud of that.

She shoos him back into his rooms, frees his arms, and then locks the door behind her. Derek takes off the gag, leaves it in the dumbwaiter.

His rooms are very quiet.

Kate is going away again.

Derek goes and lies down on his bed and doesn't think about anything.

\+ + +

He gets up an hour later, unrested. It's always like this whenever he ends up in her bed, and he doesn't really get it but he's learned how it works. He has at least a day of this ahead of him: dead tired, dread nipping at his ears, forgetting where things go in their particular drawers.

He smells Stiles as he sits up, shakes the heavy off his eyes. Stiles' sweat is all over the bed, and there's a new salty palm smell at the door handle, the hinges. He'd pushed them, prodded them, and they hadn't budged. 

Everything here is unforgiving.

There has never been a Stiles when he's like this—alone after Kate—needy and resentful and empty. He finds him sitting back in the corner of the kitchen where he left him, wedged between the sink and the wall, left hand curled protectively around his right arm. He looks like he's been turned off. The whole kitchen smells like him; he must have rifled through it, looking for a weapon, a way out.

He hasn't taken the gag off. It would have been hard, but it doesn't even smell like he's tried.

 _Good boy_.

Derek reaches to haul him up—Stiles shakes his head frantically, fruitlessly trying to pull his right side away, staggers up as Derek pulls.

"Get undressed."

Another shake.

Derek tears his clothes off numbly. Stiles' shoulder is mottled purple, tinged green. Something tore in him. The blood is dead now, settled under his skin.

He feels like he's underwater, the room murky and muted. He falls down into the bed, pulling Stiles in with him. The sheets still smell like the first time he fucked him, and it's a distraction. Stiles stops struggling after Derek chokes him for a bit, is cold and boney but better than nothing. 

Derek wraps his arms around him and breathes into his neck and feels a little better.

\+ + +

He fucks Stiles in a haze the next morning, on his knees with his face down in between Derek's thighs. He opens him with a finger first, feels how tight he is, how much he clings as Derek pulls out. Derek wants that clinging, pushes in hard and waits, pulls out slow each time to feel the long drag of Stiles' asshole around his cock.

It's nice.

Stiles takes it okay, still raw from that first fuck and straining away with his tight long thighs. Derek gives him a solid dicking: hard in and slow out every time until he loses his rhythm. It's so good when he comes, every inch crammed inside.

He pulls out after but keeps one hand on Stiles' neck, bent over so the come doesn't slide out.

Stiles' asshole is all puffy. Derek touches it, fascinated. It's hot and red, scattered hair around it. Derek licks it once, tastes comes and lube and a little blood.

Stiles makes a noise like a dying animal.

"Shut up," Derek says, lazy, almost friendly. He lets go of Stiles' head and grips his hips again so he can lick as he likes. 

Licking is the most tangled part of Derek's now very untangled life. It's an animal thing and a him thing, and Kate used to purr right down to her pussy back when he licked her out of plain old stupid affection. He likes the way things smell and that's always the way things taste; licking is much easier than talking and says much more.

When he was a kid it was like touching a new thing, or smelling it. Tasting is a sense humans don't appreciate in the same way, and now even if he were free and with a pack he knows he'd be all wrong about it, sex and tongues too braided up for the past six years.

 _You're such a fucking animal_. Kate loves it.

Derek shoves his tongue in Stiles' asshole, closes his eyes and forgets all about her.

He's only ever licked Kate like this, and a boy is different. He smells different and his skin is different, the hairy seam between his asshole and his balls. Stiles has heavy ones, and they're _his_ , they're _Derek's_ , he can crush them or twist them or just hold them, rolling their weight in his hand. He can lick them and nuzzle them and suck them into his mouth, so he does, gently, just the barest teeth to keep Stiles grateful.

The tender line between Stiles' ass and thigh catches his eyes, gets its own tonguing, and then the goosebumps on his cheeks. He nips at the bruises he left last night—they're small and yellow, almost nothing, but they make Stiles jump like they're brands. Derek is starting to feel generous, so he shifts away, pets the spare hair on Stiles' thighs and then just lets his own wet exhales reflect back from Stiles' skin onto him.

He gives Stiles' asshole one last messy kiss and sits up, wipes his mouth.

Stiles is a wreck.

He's been making noise, something Derek had heard dimly, but now he's silent except for the ragged breath through the gag. There's a puddle of drool on the bed, and Stiles' face is unhappily mashed into it. He's covered his head again, this time like he wants to hide, right arm tucked up, ribs leaping.

Derek did this.

Stiles will never be the same now. Even if Kate took him away and let him go and the bruises healed he'd still be like this.

\+ + +

It's morning again.

Sunlight streams in through the window, gentler now that he's indulged. Stiles' stomach is rumbling, gouging angry sounds. Derek is surprised to find he's hungry too. Usually when he gets in these post-Kate funks he doesn't eat for a couple of days, his appetite dead.

"Up."

Stiles takes long seconds to get it, moves like a claymation doll.

Idiot.

His head is bowed, so Derek cups his hand around it, pets the soft hair before gripping the back of his neck. "Shower?"

Stiles nods, tendons working under Derek's palm.

"Look at me."

Stiles looks.

"Want the gag out?"

Another nod.

"Ready to behave?"

_You gonna be a good little puppy?_

The only downside to nodding is that it's harder to detect lies. Stiles' heartbeat is elevated, but it's probably fear.

He leads Stiles to the bathroom.

The locking mechanism for the gag is tricky, designed that way so it would stay even when Derek's hands were free and he was in the mood to invite punishment. Stiles fidgets impatiently while he undoes it, coughs a couple of times when Derek pulls it out and wipes his mouth neurotically, over and over while Derek gets the water running. He wets an old rag, the softest he has, gestures to Stiles to come stand in the water where his feet will be warm.

Stiles freezes.

Derek growls.

Stiles won't budge, glaring up at him with his good eye, the lights harsh over the bandage. Derek can smell the wound under it, the empty.

Derek pulls him in, heedless of how he trips over the lip of the tub, of his wrapping under the water.

Stiles fights like a cat: smaller in the water but quick. He's off balance with only one eye, but he's smarter this time—a savage pull on the electric collar, an elbow in his diaphragm, and an awkward kick to his groin. Derek lashes out reflexively, claws slashing—along Stiles' foot, the thick pad along the ball. Stiles wails, collapses to his knees and slams into Derek's stomach.

Derek grabs him by the neck, bears down on him and tightens his grip.

Stiles fights harder than ever as he struggles for air, desperate for a grab on the slippery porcelain, scrabbling for a weak spot in Derek's wrist, in his hand, prying at his fingers and then kicking and thrashing for air. Derek waits until Stiles starts to go lightheaded, his struggles weaker, and then lets go.

Gasping in air, Stiles leans forward, hands around his throat. It's bruised already, muddy shapes with the vague outline of his hand.

Derek gives him ten seconds and then chokes him again.

Kate had done it with electricity.

He does it four times, until Stiles can barely hold Derek's wrist, much less fight it. His unhurt eye is red with blood.

The water has gone cold while he choked him. Derek shoves him under the spray. "This is your fault."

Stiles wheezes and coughs, unable to speak but bleating out ugly wordless noises. Blood sluices down into the drain with the shower water. Derek will have to use some of the first aid supplies—but it will be worth it to see him crawl.

Derek will do what he has to.

They wash in silence. Stiles' lips go pale with cold.

Derek doesn't touch him again.

\+ + +

He disinfects Stiles' foot, wraps it, changes the other bandages that got wet. The gashes on Stiles' brow and cheek are hot. His eye is gone. Derek makes toast.

Stiles tears it into tiny bits, forces them down his bruised throat.

"What now?" Stiles finally manages. 

Derek likes the wary way Stiles looks at him. 

"Laundry, clean up. Maybe you can blow me later."

"I mean." Stiles swallows. "Bigger picture."

"I fuck you until Gerard comes back, then you die. Big enough?"

"Huge." The word is a squeak.

Derek isn't angry about the shower anymore, so he adds, "But—Kate said the same thing to me six years ago, and I'm still here."

Stiles' punishment is, per federal contract, up to the hunters. The Argents are notorious for refusing bribes, pride themselves on centuries of frontier justice. Derek tore apart a governor's son two years ago: ripped his throat out in the sitting room upstairs, just so the Argents could make a point to the governor himself, who was watching. The son hadn't been much older than Stiles. Derek never knew what he had done. 

Kate had been so pleased with him after, threw him down on the bloodsoaked Persian rug and rode him until his skin wore off on the scratching wet fiber.

Stiles stares up at him, face hard under the puffy new bandage wrapped over his eye. There are scratch marks on his neck where he had struggled, torn into himself to try to get away. 

His words are slow, thick and sticky like sap: "Lucky you."

Derek digs blunt human fingers into Stiles' hurt shoulder until he screams.

\+ + +

The next three days stroll by.

He has Stiles bent over the bed, narrow cheeks spread wide so Derek can watch his cock fuck in and out. Even after only a few days, Stiles' asshole is always red and puffy now, opens for his dick whenever he wants it. That thought alone is enough to send him over the edge, but he holds back, shuddering every time Stiles flinches around him.

Stiles was made for this; he's perfect for it. Derek leans forward, slams into him, driving his hips into the bed with each shove, needing Stiles to feel it even after he's done. He buries his nose in Stiles' neck, needs to smell that knowing in him—that he's Derek's, that no one else will ever have him like this, that it will last as long as they do. 

If Derek isn't fucking him, he just kneels over Stiles and jerks off until he comes all over his face. Stiles' neck is still dark and bruised, his lips red and swollen from the gag. After a few times Stiles is more or less broken to it.

They have so little time, and this is all they have.

Afterward, he hobbles around the rooms, reads whatever books Derek lets him have and lets Derek wipe him down with a wet cloth. He sleeps for hours and hours.

Derek likes to watch him: twitching eyelid, lax mouth, the slope in his shoulders when he finally lets go.

Time before Stiles seems so empty now. He remembers watching the window for the weather to change, for birds to fly by, hoping unhappily that Kate would return soon—even though it meant that she had been successful on another hunt, that someone else had been killed.

\+ + +

The escape attempt comes the fourth morning.

The rooms are built to contain an Alpha: thick concrete walls filled with mountain ash, and bulletproof windows with limited opening capacity. The ash door locks from the outside, and the dumbwaiter is too small to fit anything larger than a cat. The only sharp things in the house are the shaving razors Kate grudgingly allows him, and they're dull.

Stiles must have given it some thought. He convinces Derek he needs a chair in the bathroom—the best light is there, he needs to look over his foot—and uses it to prop the door closed before starting to jimmy open the window. Derek can hear it creaking. It's the only window that opens more than two inches, and it's still tiny—and only opens into the enclosure. But Stiles could shimmy through it. He's thin.

He's so fucking angry he can't breathe.

Stiles was smart enough to realize that he won't break down the door, but still doesn't realize that there's nowhere to hide. The hinges on the door come undone easily enough, a relic from the time he tried this stunt with Kate.

 _Bad dog_.

He grabs Stiles by the scruff, and shoves him in the cage by the bed. Stiles carries on until a snarl shuts him up.

Derek needs to think, gets to his feet and starts to pace. His skin itches, remembering. 

"Don't you think I've _tried_ that?" 

"Can you blame me?"

Derek should have gagged him.

The stove would get hot enough. He could press Stiles down on it.

Even the thought of burned flesh is enough to make Derek gag.

He can feel all the usual scratches in the concrete under him as he paces, tight circles his legs have memorized. Stiles is saying something but Derek can't handle that right now. Just the sound of his voice tints his vision, sharpens his claws. His skin prickles, itching furiously, bleeds when he scratches. His claws are out, tense with memory.

He slouches into the bathroom and listens to the water heater, inhales the bleachy-piss reek of the toilet. The window really is small; Stiles probably couldn't have gotten out.

He doesn't want to do it.

He should just bite Stiles instead, rip his throat out like he wanted to only days ago. His teeth prick his lips. 

But it's been so much better with him here, warm and his, a distracting new thing to smell and fuck and have. He doesn't want to get rid of him before he has to.

He doesn't want to burn him.

He has to hurt him.

\+ + +

By dinnertime, Stiles hasn't had anything to drink in a day.

Derek looms over the cage. "Ready to come out?"

Stiles flips him off.

\+ + +

At the end of the second day, he's much more amenable.

\+ + +

"What happens when I come out?" Thirst scrapes at his words.

"Water. Bathroom. Then I'll punish you."

"So this—it's a reward?"

"It's a reminder that everything outside the cage is a privilege."

It's the oldest thing in the rooms: Derek's world for the first few months after his family died, and then a box during his shift until Kate finally decided to lengthen his leash. Now he stays there only when he can't stand to be anywhere else.

The cage is a gift.

Stiles hunches over his knees. "What're you gonna do?"

"Does it matter?"

_Got you right where I want you, pretty boy._

Stiles is too shaky to hold the glass, so Derek does it for him. Their fingers never touch. Derek walks him to the toilet, checks his bandages after. He's healing.

He puts him on his knees next to the cage. No fight this time. Stiles is bone tired, thin.

"Can I get food after?"

 _I had a dog that used to bargain for treats_ , Gerard had said once, _But you're not a dog, are you, son?_

Derek goes to get the gag.

" _No_." Stiles scrambles away at the sight of it. "No, _please_ , okay, okay, I'll do what you want, please, please don't, I'll fucking _juggle_ for you that's what you want."

"You know what I want."

Stiles' face crumples.

Derek's abs flex out of habit when Stiles breathes on his cock, so he cups a hand around the back of his head. "If you bite me again, you'll regret it."

_Make it good, puppy._

He doesn't bite. 

He mouths Derek's cock so hesitantly, gagging before it's even hit the back of his throat when Derek pulls him in. His tongue is wet and a little cool from the water, drags delicious along the underside of Derek's cock. 

He lets Stiles set the pace, feeling generous with this dirty mouth on his cock, his wet red lips stretched around him, cheeks hollowed. His ears are very pink. Derek touches them, entranced, strokes the top of his head. All the anger has left him, with the kid huddled on his knobby knees on the floor, Derek looming over him. He's good, in control, almost safe, so he lets his vision narrow, orgasm coiling in his balls just from this sloppy excuse for a cocksucking.

"That's good," he praises. He's never understood Kate's need to talk through it until now. "Keep licking, yeah, like that, open your mouth, that's it. Yeah—no, no, take it in, that's it, nice and easy, _ssh_ , _ssh_."

He wants it to be like the first time: Stiles swallowing him with the numb of a man who's going to die, almost accepting, almost unaware.

He pulls him in and it's nearly tender, his neck in the palm of Derek's hand. His hips are rolling now, reflexively, and it's making Stiles gag, but that's okay, it's still good, the hot suck of his mouth, the tight ring of his throat. Derek grips him with both hands, palms over his cold ears, and pushes. There's a pop as he squeezes past his gag reflex. Stiles' throat bulges from Derek's cock, unwanted tears running. His hands are in the air, hold nothing, fingers flexed like claws.

Derek holds him so gently when he comes—mindful of the bandages. 

In bed, Stiles huddles on his side, face to the wall. When his breathing's mostly even, Derek admits, "The first time I tried to escape, Kate burned my feet to the bone."

It had taken him months to heal, and that was with his tougher skin. 

A few months later he'd bolted while they were headed out. He'd gotten as far as the driveway, and Kate had been furious. He'd dreaded what would happen this time: another burn somewhere else, a hand sawed off. Instead, she'd locked him in that cage and left him for a week, until he would have gouged out his own eyes if he got to drink after.

"The second time, she made me swallow boiling oil."

"So I'm supposed to be, what—" Stiles coughs as his throat closes, forces out, " _grateful_?"

Derek slaps him. His body had plunged into frothy seizures almost as soon as the bubbling oil had hit his tongue, but it's the smell of his own burnt flesh that lingers with him. Kate had _cooked_ him.

He doesn't want to think about that. "Can you really juggle?"

" _What_?"

"You offered to."

"So?"

His hair's so soft, a touch lullaby. "Keep talking."

"Oh my _god_."

Derek pulls on his ear, too tired for a real nip.

Stiles' voice is thready and cracked, but he talks—about McCall. They were benched for lacrosse together; McCall had asthma. They used to run around the woods together anyway until they were caught.

Derek understands that.

He used to run too.

\+ + +

Stiles is at the counter when Derek shuffles into the kitchen the next morning; he's making a sandwich. He's leaning uncomfortably off his scratched foot, a plastic butter knife clutched unsure in his left hand.

Kate would have punished him for this—made him chew glass, made him lick her for hours until she decided he was really hungry. 

"On your knees," Derek orders instead.

"Please." The word disappears in his bruised throat.

"Down," Derek repeats, pushing him down when he doesn't obey. Stiles lands ungainly, shifting his injured foot, one hand over his right shoulder like Derek will tear it out again.

Derek takes the sandwich, pulls it into bits, feeds them slowly to Stiles. He chews wordlessly, staring at the ground, swaying on his knees. His lips brush Derek's fingers, awkward and accidental.

He's so thin. Derek will feed him more.

\+ + +

He changes Stiles' bandages once a day. His eye has started to heal, scabs over enough that Derek doesn't wrap it anymore. His left eye is always closed, lid flat where it used to be round.

Stiles won't shut up about McCall.

McCall was good with animals, used to work at the veterinary clinic and could charm the shyest dogs and cruelest cats into his hands. McCall's dad was an asshole so McCall never put up with bullies, even when they were twice his size, ran after them until he was wheezing so bad he fell down and they kicked the shit out of him. McCall had a crooked jaw. 

He mumbles McCall's name in his sleep now, low enough that his round soft ears can't hear. Derek hears.

Gerard will be coming back in only a few days.

"Just tell him where McCall is," Derek snaps. "He doesn't care about you. He'll let you live."

Maybe with Derek.

Stiles looks up from where he had been staring at the table—like he hadn't been aware Derek was there. His mouth is open, lips soft. "I don't know where he is."

"You're lying." Derek can hear the uneven thump thump of Stiles heart. If he doesn't know, he has a pretty good idea.

Stiles' shoulders square. "You sound just like _him_."

For a long moment, Derek thinks Stiles must mean McCall, and isn't sure whether it's a good thing or not. Stiles likes McCall, has followed him around puppylike for years. Maybe he likes the way he sounds.

Then he realizes.

\+ + +

Derek has him sleep on the floor after that. He doesn't want to get confused again, and Stiles doesn't deserve to be warm, doesn't deserve the meager scraps Derek can offer when he's been so spoiled all these years, when even his enemies pity him.

Derek hates him.

\+ + +

Kate is gone for such unending time.

Derek waits to lose his mind or his patience or both. Stiles makes himself as scarce as possible, relief frank on his face whenever Derek comes into a room and reaches for anything but him.

Derek knows Kate is going to take Stiles away from him, probably sooner rather than later—when she comes back next. He gives himself that deadline; he's survived by setting his own schedule, and this is just another one.

Then Gerard comes back.

\+ + +

He comes with the drop, hands clasped smug behind him. He doesn't touch any of the supplies, watches imperious while the men unload the meager boxes Derek's life comes packaged in.

Stiles, tied up on the bed, looks even more gangly next to them. The scratches over his eye and foot are slowly healing, his arm no longer stiff under his clothes, but he's too thin. 

"Last chance," Gerard says, too gently. "We'll let you go if you just tell us where Scott is. We can send you home today. Wouldn't you like that?"

Stiles huffs nervous. "You guys must really suck at this if you need my help that bad."

When they leave, they take Stiles with them.

Gerard lays an unnecessary hand on Stiles' shoulder, by his neck over the collarbone, keeps it there as they walk out.

Derek isn't ready.

He thought—Stiles has been the most unusual thing to happen to him since he tore his uncle's throat out, the only break in the deadening monotony. And he knew it wasn't forever— _all good things must come to an end, puppy, now open wide_ —but he thought—

Derek can barely breathe, lightheaded with it, fumbling. He feels like an Alpha, but the world is still in terrifying human technicolor, all weight upside down as the most powerful he's ever felt and the least blur. And he knows that even if he's ever freed, and he changes again and knows that he can go anywhere and do anything, he knows he'll remember this moment, when he was so afraid he felt like an animal.

And all Gerard has done is touched a thing that Derek thought he had.

\+ + +

They bring Stiles back three hours later and don't even tie him down. Stiles is wailing low, punctuated by the occasional shriek as he's shifted. Derek presses up against the bars, listening, smelling. Stiles' heartbeat is strong, lungs not punctured. He smells like blood and afraid and hose water.

Gerard isn't there. It's just Chris, grimfaced.

"Easy—no, on his side."

They drop Stiles ungentle onto the bed and he curls up. He's naked. His knees are scraped, and he's soaked.

Chris nods at the men to leave. "You've got two weeks."

He glares at him as he leaves, doesn't look away—like Derek's the threat here.

Derek doesn't want to carry Stiles with his ribs injured, helps him up under his shoulders and half-drags him instead. No knees broken, no new wounds on his feet. Cold water drips along the concrete floors as Derek hauls him to the bathroom.

Stiles is too uncoordinated to get into the tub himself, leans ungainly on Derek. He clutches Derek's shoulder as he lowers down onto the cold porcelain, gritting his chattering teeth. He keeps choking out these wet little wheezes, head curled low near Derek's arm.

When Derek touches him he doesn't flinch away.

Derek washes off the blood, swiping the towel over his bleeding mouth, sluicing water over the small burns that look like they come from a lighter—maybe matches. He wraps his ribs, sets his narrow broken fingers as best he can. He uses what Chris left.

Stiles keeps hiccuping in pain, breath hitched, can't fill up with air. He watches Derek's hands, one good eye and one shadow. His hands trail Derek's, too slow to push him away, too weak. His elbows are everywhere, knock awkward against the tub.

Stiles begins to sob.

He cries like a little kid, face scrunched up, eyebrows knitted together and mouth pulled down. He covers his head with his hands, his free fingers clutching against his skull like he can push his thoughts back, his memories away. He doesn't let go when Derek pulls him up, takes him over to the bed and yanks him down into it with him.

He's warm and shivering, won't stop crying even though Derek can tell he's trying, looking up afraid at Derek and trying to swallow down the noise.

Something crunches on the bed. Derek smells that it's from Chris's pocket. He picks it up.

It's a packet of aspirin—just two pills, one little dose, in a tearaway paper package.

Derek growls, flings it away. He turns back, settles his hand on Stiles' face, thumb on the fragile skin of his eyelids, over his ruined left eye.

Stiles goes very still, barely breathes.

Derek trails his hand down, over Stiles' torn mouth and his strong jaw, down to his throat. His skin is soft between the patches of his beard, over his shifting brittle trachea. He puts both his hands around Derek's, sweaty and bandaged.

Derek can do it. He can do it.

"Please," Stiles babbles wetly. His whole body is vibrating. "Please—please, please, please."

Derek takes his pain instead.

It hurts enough to make him grunt, biting into his arm before loping through the rest of his body. He holds on until Stiles has stopped convulsing under him, sinks slowly into his tired as the pain eases.

He holds on after Stiles has finally fallen asleep, watches his fretful belly.

\+ + +

Derek has known two brutal facts about his life ever since his house and family burned to the ground.

One: his life will never get better. 

Two: it can always get worse.

Until Stiles.

\+ + +

Every morning now, Stiles stumbles numbly out of bed when Derek pushes him, sways until Derek pulls him into the bathroom, careful of his bandages. Derek uses an old shirt now as a washcloth, the softest he has, runs soapy hands all over him and washes his growing hair. Once or twice he shaves him, tilts his head up and scrapes delicately along his human skin. Stiles watches the ceiling, won't look at him. He holds very still when Derek cleans his wounds, checks for puss.

In the afternoon he reads or sleeps again, or picks at the threads in the blankets, at his bandages, at his scabs. He never eats dinner, face ashen, and he still tries to run away when Derek reaches for him—even though it jostles his wounds, even though there's nowhere to go.

There is so _much_ of Stiles, and it's all perfect—the warm, overpowering smell of him, still so new every time. He smells like outside and like Derek, and like meat. He smells like choice—like Derek's choice, every second he's alive. Even his burns smell good.

Derek touches him all over, with his mouth and his hands—the thick salty callouses on his toes and the balls of his feet, the hair on his shins and the long narrow muscle he must have built in lacrosse, running in the dirt. He's thin, but Derek likes to lick the hair down the valley of his belly, nuzzles his jutting hipbones. He sniffs carefully at his wrapped up ribs, licks his nipples, undeterred when Stiles bats at his head. His favorite thing is to hold down Stiles' arm and lick at the wet hair of his armpits, but he doesn't do it very much; Stiles thrashes so hard Derek worries he'll mess up his ribs. 

The sex is the best he's ever had.

Stiles had disappeared to the bathroom after dinner—the door closed useless. There are no locks on any doors except for the cage, and Stiles never goes near it. 

Derek opens the door and finds him crouched in the tub.

"Come on," Derek says. 

"No," Stiles says. He says that every night, all the time.

Derek is more indulgent than Kate was.

"There's nowhere to go. Might as well come easy."

Derek holds out his hand.

"Not tonight." Sometimes Stiles fights, and sometimes he runs, and sometimes he tries to talk his away out of it. Derek doesn't gag him anymore, likes the way someone else's voice fills the room. 

"Then when?" Bargaining is Kate's favorite game. Derek is beginning to understand why.

Stiles narrows his eyes at him, grips the lip of the bathtub. "You're just a barrel of laughs tonight, aren't you."

His jaw tightens when Derek looms over him, head down and mulish. Derek gets him out of the tub and onto his knees.

"Good boy."

"Fuck you."

That used to be Derek's answer too.

"Open your mouth."

Stiles doesn't, so Derek slaps him—hard, across the face, like Victoria did years ago when he growled. Gerard had followed up with torture after, but Derek only slaps him again. Stiles rocks back, so Derek takes him gentle by the shoulder, slaps him again until Stiles opens his mouth.

His cheeks are burning red when Derek puts his cock in, and his mouth feels hotter than last time. 

Stiles gags hard when Derek's cock hits the back of his throat, panics and rears back.

Derek sighs, slaps him.

Stiles' eyes begin to water, his hands pushing and scrabbling against Derek's opened jeans. Derek cups his hand around the base of his skull and pushes in with his cock, murmuring, "Easy now, open up for me, just take it easy, easy, that's it—no, no."

Slap.

It takes a long hour. Stiles starts trying towards the end, eyes wide with panic every time he gags hard. Derek isn't cruel—waits for him to cough it out, slaps him again. His skin is so soft, barely any hair on his cheeks, his jaw fitted to Derek's hand. Derek brushes his red cheek with his knuckles, soothing. 

He could snap Stiles' neck with one blow, crack his skull on the floor. 

He's careful. 

Stiles must bite his lip at the wrong time somewhere along the line. Blood drips down his chin, smeared messy with spit along Derek's balls. It smells so good. There's never been anyone else's dick in there but his. He fucks Stiles' throat open exactly to the shape of his cock, like it was made for him.

Stiles' eyes start to roll.

Derek pulls back, holds Stiles' hair with one hand, pumps his dick with the other until he covers Stiles' bright cheeks with come, splashes it along his stretched bleeding lips.

Stiles keeps looking at him even when Derek lets go; there is something so correct in him like this, covered in Derek's come. He smells like every human thing. Derek licks his face all over, holds him still while Stiles thrashes until he pins him on the ground, cups his jaw so he can lick up blood, semen, tears. Stiles works his throat, bites him miserably. Derek doesn't mind. Stiles will learn to be good, just like Derek.

Derek runs his tongue tender along the scarring scratches on Stiles' face, over the seam of his eyelids.

Stiles whimpers, hands shaking on him.

Derek licks even the hurt away.

"Sh," Derek says. "Sh. That was good. It's over now. You can sleep in my bed tonight."

No need to hold Stiles down now; he falls asleep in moments, mumbling about McCall with his bruised throat, his round boyish face softening with sleep. He smells most of sweat, the layered kind that builds in winter, under unyielding unbreathing clothing. The clothes are all of Derek's old ones, the ones Kate had given him when he had first come to the rooms, when he was smaller. He had to earn them—now he lets Stiles wrap himself in as many as he likes.

Derek's life is better than it was before.

He is terrified.

\+ + +

The full moon rises. 


	2. Chapter 2

Derek has been _conditioned_.

In the first stark months after his family died, Kate strapped him down and electrocuted him for hours on end. He remembers trying to turn, choking with it, until finally he locked it away and lay with the stink of sizzling skin until he was riddled pink and Kate was smiling. Only then did she let him out during the full moon.

If Kate's not around to let him out, he locks himself in, puts the key just outside the bars, where he can reach it easily with human hands. Then he gives in to delirium, scratches the walls and gnaws drooling on the bars until his gums bleed. Turning Alpha made the change _more_ , with no pack to steady him the way they had when he was little, unsteady even on four legs. It's the closest thing he has to escape, and he wouldn't give it up even if he could.

But the last time he changed, he nearly bit Stiles in two. By the look of him, Stiles remembers. His lip puffs from his gnawing teeth while he stares anxiously at the waxing moon, at Derek pacing. 

He doesn't trust Stiles with the key while he's in the cage, but leaving the two of them alone together with nothing between them under the full moon is unthinkable. He won't bite Stiles—wouldn't now even if Gerard wouldn't punish him for it.

"You get to go in the cage," he admits eventually.

Stiles, surprisingly, doesn't fight. Maybe he's starting to understand what the cage is. Derek gives him the key, too, just to be cautious. Stiles clutches it against himself like a talisman.

Derek spares one last panting second to hope he doesn't destroy what little furniture there is, and then gives in.

Red slaps him in the face, sends him reeling dizzily while his skin shifts, claws and teeth lengthening. He's bigger and stronger and _different_ , inside out in his body and where he expects himself to be: in a room instead of in the woods, in a room instead of in a cage.

For the first few seconds all he can feel is panic bubbling up in his chest. He needs to run, to be _away_. This place is stale, rotten, nothing but a fetid smell seeping down into his chest. Then he sniffs again, and his claws tighten reflexively.

There's _meat_ in the cage.

He thunders down on it, drool dripping through the bars as he gnaws on them. They hurt his teeth, sting right through his jaws, but he can't bear down on anything but the buzzing need to tear something apart. There's a human in the cage and he smells like everyone who's ever hurt him.

He paces back and forth in front of the cage, digs fruitlessly at the stinging ground in front until his claws bleed. He snarls until the bars vibrate, howls when the bars hold still against his lunges, sending him tumbling away only to rally and charge it again.

He's still howling when the moon has set, and he collapses against the bars. He's on the wrong side of them again, everything he wants just out of reach. He tastes blood in his mouth and remembers the first time he tasted it, holding sweet red rabbit in his jaws while his mother looked on. He remembers her approving hand on the back of his neck.

His howls sag into wet nostalgic wuffles.

Afterward, Stiles is panting distantly. He's soaked in sweat, hunched up against the wall, knees up and hands curled against his chest, unbandaged fingers curled tight over the key, the warm iron smell of it coating his palms. His breaths hit Derek in wet cooling puffs.

"Come to bed," Derek slurs, body aching with unreleased craving.

"Go to hell." Stiles' voice is rough, like he's been howling too. 

Derek curls up where he is, thinks about how Stiles' hands would feel on the soft spots behind his ears.

\+ + +

When the sun streams in through the narrow windows of the rooms, Derek stretches, works his jaw. He aches everywhere, weak from the change and with no urge to get up. The floor has gouges in it from his claws, concrete dust everywhere, blood spattered on the floor where his mouth had bled.

Stiles is still sleeping, the key to the cage curled up tight in his fists. 

Derek clambers quiet to his feet and skips a shower for now, makes breakfast. He doesn't expect Stiles to join him—was ready for him to spend as much time as he wanted behind bars before he came out. But Stiles shambles in halfway through his meal. The greening bruises Gerard left stand out in high relief.

They eat in silence.

"I was thinking—about the last time."

Derek doesn't look up, keeps chewing.

Drawing a deep breath, Stiles says, "They thought I was going to die, right?"

Derek says nothing.

"And if they thought I was going to die, then it means they didn't need me. Because I don't know anything."

Derek pushes his cereal around with his spoon. It's always corn flakes. "Do you?"

"No."

"You're lying." He takes another bite of cereal. It tastes like nothing.

Stiles huffs. "But they thought I didn't. And if they thought that, then why still keep me alive?"

"Why not?" 

"But they're interrogating me when they already think I don't know anything. Why?"

"Who cares? They did it. They'll do it again." 

"But it doesn't make any sense!"

Derek drops his spoon. "Why do you think they do anything? You really think they give a shit about what you know? Or this— _Scott McCall_? He's just the latest. It was Uncle Peter before him and my mother before him, and after McCall's dead there's going to be someone else. They don't care about catching him, they're just using him to remind you that they're in control. And nobody cares as long as they stick to tiny towns with tiny people no one will miss. No one's gonna miss you, Stilinski, no one important. You lived, and they're just making you pay for it."

Stiles swallows, muted. Derek realizes it's the most he's said in all the time he's been here.

"They hurt you because they can," he finishes. 

"Scott will miss me," Stiles says. His voice is rough, like it had been after he'd been in the cage for two days with nothing to drink.

Derek says nothing.

"They filmed me while they—"

When Derek looks back, Stiles is staring at the ground. His face is more shadowed than it was before.

Derek doesn't like it. "You're just a toy."

"Not to everyone."

Derek growls. "You're nothing to anyone else while you're here."

"I'm still something to Scott."

"What, his friend? He'll move on."

Derek had friends too.

"No."

Derek raises his eyebrows, but Stiles doesn't sound like he's arguing. He seems—alone.

"No, I'm bait."

\+ + +

Gerard is with the supplies drop later that day.

Stiles' heartbeat rockets. He's curled in a corner on the bed, knees up by his shoulders, arms twisted ungainly where his hands are chained to the meager headboard.

Derek had started out with a mattress on the floor. He had been so confused by the frame, the new sheets after months of the same rags.

 _You were starting to reek_ , Kate had said, before pulling his arms up for the shackles.

Stiles wasn't here when this place was just a hovel, before all the rules had settled into place. He's shaking now under Gerard's patient stare, but he has no idea what depths Gerard can sink to.

It was Gerard who had two men cut strips off his chest for hours. It was Gerard who let Kate burn down his family. It was Gerard who had him tear apart his uncle.

"We have your father," he says.

Huddled on the bed, Stiles uncurls with surprise. "What?"

"He'd gone into hiding back when that McCall woman did, but we found him. We always do."

Stiles stares mutely, mouth hanging open. 

"We're hoping he cooperates more than you did, but we'll see. You Stilinskis are a stubborn lot."

"No," Stiles hoarses. "No."

"I think an officer of the law like him would have to know a few things about where people are, where they might go. Don't you?"

"Look, take me instead." Stiles' voice picks up, sudden frantic, "Let him go, just let him go and take me instead."

"No, no. You had your chance, sonny. But I suppose we'll keep you around. Derek here seems to have taken quite the shine to you, and who knows—you may turn out to be useful."

They leave.

Derek unlocks himself as the door closes. Stiles is pulling on the cuffs at the bed, jerking them against his wrists. "Take me instead," he keeps repeating, shouting, "Take me instead and just let him go."

Derek can already smell the new bruises blooding under the skin. Derek unlocks him, watches as he runs at the door.

"Take me instead!" Stiles screams at the unanswering door. He rushes it, screams, raw and wordless. Half his fingers are still wrapped in bandages but he pounds the door again and again, winds back and throws his whole body against it. His shoulders are shaking, and he won't stop screaming.

He waits, but Stiles won't stop. He pulls Stiles away from the door, hands on his shoulders.

"You have to be quiet," he warns, remembering.

Stiles staggers away from him. "Get—I—I have to get out."

He begins to shake while Derek watches, like a wet dog, tail tucked between its legs. Derek can hear his heart racing, watches as he clutches his chest like he's having a heart attack. But Derek can't sense any sickness, just a muddy haze. 

It smells like his own flesh burning, Kate coming at him with the poker, nowhere to run but the cage.

"I have to get out," Stiles babbles. "Please, please, I'll do anything, I have to, my—he can't come here, I have to—you don't, I _have_ to—"

He's scrabbling on the floor, keels over to clap his hands against his chest.

The smell is panic.

Derek has no idea what to do.

\+ + +

"Why don't you ever fight them?" Stiles asks the next day. He hasn't slept at all.

"It's not worth it." Derek is looking over Stiles' bandages. He keeps the broken fingers laced straight, the broken ribs wrapped tight. There are always thick bandages over his hot healing foot. Stiles half drags it now when he paces unhappy around the rooms. Derek doesn't mind.

"But," says Stiles, licking unwet lips. "You're an Alpha now—aren't they supposed to be, like, super strong?"

"You're not listening." Even an Alpha can't fight wolfsbane, but that's not the point. Derek's family is dead. His life is gone. "I said it wasn't _worth_ it."

Stiles stares at him with unhidden horror while Derek sniffs over his lesser wounds for rot. The burns are only small now, less red. The bruises fade.

He picks up again: "What about the city? Scott and I were looking into it, before—after he was bitten. You could go to San Francisco and—"

"Hide? The Argent family is four hundred years old. They've been hunting us before this place was a country, and Kate—I'd have to kill them. I'd have to start a war, and I don't have an army."

"You could make one."

"You asking for the bite?"

Stiles still shakes when Derek touches his face, the bright red of his growing scars—the tender swollen eyelid covering nothing. Derek can feel that it hurts. "No."

"Then shut up." He cups Stiles' face, touches the soft hot skin behind the hinge of Stiles' jaw. He lets the pain jut into him.

Stiles swallows against his hand. "How come you keep hurting me if you keep—doing that?" 

He gestures at Derek's hand on him, the angry black lines of his pain seeping up into Derek's flesh.

Derek tightens his grip. "Do you want me to stop?"

"Oh, now you care?" Stiles shoots back. His shoulders hunch, bracing himself for Derek to take his hand away.

Derek doesn't. "Just enjoy it while it lasts."

Stiles peers up at him from under his heavy brow. He smells different—puzzling, maybe. It's a rain sort of smell. Derek remembers it fuzzily but can't name it.

"You'll never have an army," Stiles says finally, when Derek is finished. He's still hunched, waiting for pain. "But you could have had me."

\+ + +

Derek once stood at the door and screamed for three days.

It had been a year in, and Kate had been away for the first time. The supplies had been sent by dumbwaiter then, little things every so often unless they forgot. Derek saw no one, heard toneless voices through the doors and only bird gibber through the windows.

He didn't last long.

He'd screamed and screamed with his raw person throat, like a child who'd had a bad dream. No one came until they got him down and shoved a knife down his throat over and over and he choked on the blood.

He'd healed over in seconds, and gone straight back to screaming. He had no idea how much it had traveled through the door, how much sad round human ears could hear, so he'd screamed louder and louder—until the doors had vibrated on their hinges, until the windows had rattled. The men had come and beaten him, hands on their ears, pressed the button for his collar until ropey electrical scars scratched into his skin. He screamed through their muzzles. He killed the two who came too close, too sloppy. Only Kate coming back had quieted him, the sweat sock smell under her boots and her hairspray. It had been just around the full moon, and he was already unhuman with it.

That was the first time she'd let him out into the enclosure for the full moon. He ran for the first time in a year and remembered that there was no one out there in the woods who was coming for him. The rabbits ran away where he passed, left only their shit, their fading tracks.

He came back on his own at the end, barefoot and flat-toothed, head low. Kate hadn't been angry. She'd herded him in with her gun and then she'd torn out his teeth one by one with pliers.

He hadn't fought her. 

_See_ , Kate had said afterward, stroking his hair while he lay bone tired, his head on her lap, whimpering through the teeth growing back. _I knew you didn't need to be put down._

Derek doesn't want Stiles to die either.

\+ + +

Two days later, two men come for him in the settle of the afternoon.

He'd spent the morning scrubbing the tub with Stiles. Stiles had worked up an honest sweat, rubbed his face with his elbow boyish. Derek had wondered how much he'd fight being bent over after. He'd do it in the bed, on the blankets where Stiles' hips wouldn't bruise, where his knees wouldn't scrape.

His arm was getting stronger. He didn't trip so much anymore, had learned the measure of one eye.

He smelled so good.

Stiles had startled him: "Bleach is a weapon, right?"

Derek had prickled.

"Not—I mean, to get _out_ of here." Stiles' hands had flown, frenetic. He'd had a smudge of soap on his face. "Melt something, maybe, or—"

"They dilute it." 

Stiles hadn't looked convinced.

Derek had sighed. "The razors are dull. The knives are plastic. The dumbwaiter's too small. The walls and floors are cement, custom made with mountain ash, like the door and windows, which barely open. Door's got an alarm, same as the house."

_Only one you're gonna hurt here is yourself, puppy._

"Yeah, but you still tried."

He'd flinched when Derek glared at him, but hadn't looked away. Unafraid. "How'd you do it?"

The first time he'd fought the mountain ash, hoping he was a True Alpha. He wasn't, although he'd dented the window enough for Kate to notice. The second time had been a lucky break, literally—handcuffs that didn't work, the van door unlocked so he could slide it open quiet. Kate had zapped him before he got fifteen feet.

Stiles had still been waiting, so Derek had reached out, finally wiped off the smudge of soap from his face. "Dumb luck."

"Maybe—" Stiles had swallowed, ducked away from Derek's hand. "Maybe you just need a new definition for 'weapon.'"

"Chris won't help."

"Do you see any other options?"

_Just give in, Derek._

They hadn't spoken again until the men came.

They stare at Stiles, stiff-jawed on the bed. Derek growls until they only look at him.

He knows their faces. He used to collect them at the beginning, wanted a list of names to strike out. Now it's just old habit, still kicking. One is short, unknowable except for the claw scar on his face. The other reminds him a little of a star from a TV show he used to watch when he was little and still got sick.

They've got the remote for his shock collar. He starts to burn as soon as the door thuds closed, sizzles until they've got his leash on him, hands cuffed behind his back. They march him down the hallway, two guns pointed at him, three feet away from him on all sides. Chris is waiting for him outside, in the driver's seat of the van they hustle him into. Chris says nothing as he's strapped in, but Derek can see his reflection in the front mirror, watching.

No one tells him where they're going. 

It used to scare him.

\+ + + 

They arrive—at the sheriff's department.

Derek has never been here, but he used to go to the sandwich place a few blocks away a lot. He can smell the toasted bread from here, their cheap spiced chicken. He grits his teeth against remembering, stares at Chris's plain scuffed boots, smells only those.

He can smell the room before they even get to it. It smells like a beating, and he's not wrong: both of the eyes of the man inside are bruised and swollen, his lip split. He smells, under stale sweat and drying blood, like the soap Stiles used to wear. They've torn off his badge, but Derek can guess what it would read.

"Sheriff," Chris greets evenly. "Just a few more questions."

The sheriff squints at him, at his collar.

"All we want to know is where Scott McCall is."

"Yeah." The sheriff's smile is a grimace. He's staring at the table, shoulders slumped.

"Tell us where he is, and this is all over."

"Or what?" He gestures with his cuffed hands at his bruised face. "You'll beat me? _Murder_ my son?" 

"Aiding and abetting a known werewolf is already a crime—as you know, sheriff. As your son knows."

The sheriff starts like he's been burned. "He's alive?"

"For now," Chris says, and then ducks his head like his sister does when she knows she's cruel: "Help us find McCall and we'll see he gets a pardon."

It's not that Chris is like Kate. He has a family; he'd do anything for them.

Derek misses that.

"You're trading in _children_."

"All I want is the truth."

"I've told you before, and I'll tell you again—I don't know where he is right now."

Careful words.

"We're going to find him whether you tell us or not. One way your son dies, the other he doesn't." Chris snaps. "Do you know where Melissa McCall is?"

Could be his mother or his sister. Not that it matters: at the end of all this she'll be dead or run away. Same thing.

"I'm telling you, I don't know. If I knew, I'd tell you. I'm a sheriff for crying out loud, not—not some renegade."

Another good tactic, ending on a fact while his heart rate's still up. Makes any lie sound like truth. Derek guesses he's been coached. He must have known they'd come after him, probably picked up a trick or two over the years.

"Derek, show him your teeth."

Derek smiles at the sheriff, red-eyed.

"Now you're—what, threatening me with one werewolf to hunt another?"

"Not you," Chris says. The sheriff squints, confused, but Derek knows what's coming: "Your son is living with him right now."

"I'm going to kill you," the sheriff says coldly, and Derek thinks about that—Stiles' father killing an Argent. He doesn't care about Chris. He wouldn't mind.

Then he realizes the sheriff is talking to him.

"Have you," Chris says before Derek can respond, "Seen either of the McCalls since a warrant for their arrest was issued?"

The sheriff is still glaring at him, blood dripping into his eye. "I have no idea where Melissa or Scott McCall are—or where they might be in the near future, or who else would know."

Chris doesn't look at him. "Is he lying?"

Through his teeth.

If they find the McCall boy, they'll probably kill Stiles. 

But if they think this man doesn't know anything, they'll probably kill him. 

And then Stiles won't have to worry about him anymore.

"No." Derek says. "He doesn't know anything."

\+ + +

"What happened?" Stiles wants to know when Derek gets back.

"Nothing new," Derek says, even though it's not true. He heads for the bed, figures Stiles won't follow. He can hear Stiles shiver whenever he sleeps on the floor but he won't come to the bed unless Derek makes him.

Stiles grabs his arm. "But—didn't you find out anything?"

Derek turns, considering. "What's it worth?"

Stiles lets go, crosses his arms. His eyes are always shadowed now, puffy. "What do you want?"

Derek wants a lot. He could make Stiles do anything right now: suck Derek off, come for him, pluck his other eye out and thank Derek for it.

Kate had made him do things like that, back when he used to ask about his family.

Remembering, he says, "I told them he didn't know anything."

"He's alive?" Stiles sags with relief.

"For now."

"And Chris was the one asking him questions."

"He took me there."

"But Gerard wasn't there."

"Chris isn't any better."

Stiles glares at him. "Neither are you."

He doesn't mean it.

\+ + +

Stiles stews in the mornings, tosses one of the books fretfully from hand to hand in the bed instead of reading it. Frail paper smell fills the room.

"Stop fidgeting," Derek snaps, halfway through his daily sit-ups.

"I can't." He scowls when Derek looks at him. "I just—you're telling me don't even think about it?"

"About what?"

"If you were out right now, what would you do?"

"I'm not out. Neither are you."

"I know what I'd be doing."

Derek sighs and restarts his set.

A few minutes later, Stiles asks: "It's Friday, right?"

"All day," Derek huffs, annoyed that he has to start again. But Stiles never talks to him first—and he'd sounded so unsure. Even Derek knows what day it is. "So what would you be doing?"

"Friday, Scott and I always hang out after practice." Stiles' voice is different now. He's not here anymore, was probably back in the past before Derek even asked. "Dad works Friday nights, and so does Scott's mom, so we order a pizza and hang out at his place and get high as shit. And we always have a fuckton of candy, too. One time Scott and I got so blazed, and we had these, like, gummy bears, and gummy worms—the sour ones, you know?—and we were arguing which was better and we decided that they were these ancient enemies who were at war, so we made this whole huge gummy battle with like massive carnage everywhere and the worms eating the dead gummy bear bodies. 

"And Melissa—Scott's mom—comes home at like two in the morning and we've got the whole thing down to this one hand to hand duel between two of the candies. He had a bear and I had a worm and we were arguing over whether the sour sugar stuff was poison to gummy bears or not. We were so fucking high."

Derek considers this from the floor. He remembers fighting with Cora about candy. Red flavor was her favorite, strawberry or cherry. They used to bicker so much over stupid things like that. "What did his mother do?"

"She thought it was funny," Stiles says after a second, like he wasn't expecting the question. "She's cool."

Derek has never gotten high. He knows the smell of it, thinks about Stiles covered in smoke. With McCall.

He hates it.

Stiles won't shut up, but he's quieter now, heavy with remembering. "What about—if you were out and Kate was there, what would you do?"

"Nothing."

He's lying. 

Surprisingly, Stiles doesn't call him on it. "Okay, what if Kate wasn't there? All the Argents are gone, and it's just you."

Derek hasn't let himself think about it in years. It's not easy. The world outside is muffled, like noises behind a door. "Every Alpha needs a pack."

"So you'd make more werewolves?"

"Maybe." He can't imagine doing it, not after all of this. If things had been different—"I don't know."

"How do you make a pack?" Stiles actually looks interested, sitting on the bed, slouched over himself now that his ribs are doing better, his elbows wide over his knees.

Who else does Derek need?

"This is over." Derek rolls to his feet, is on the bed before Stiles can move and pins him easy. Stiles fights him, grabs his collar and tries to twist, but Derek bats his hands away. "You're not going anywhere."

"Get off of me."

"Say it."

"No."

Derek shakes him, drops him hard back onto the mattress. "You're only making it worse for yourself."

"No, _you're_ making it worse," Stiles shouts, neck corded. "I'm _trying_ but you're just gonna sit here and—and hurt me and wait to _die_ but fuck you, okay, I'm not. I've got a life outside. Scott's gonna figure it out and my dad—and Chris is gonna help us, he already has."

"Your life is gone. Why would Chris help you?"

"He will."

"Why would he, when he didn't help me?"

It didn't matter who you were on the outside. You went in here, and people forgot about you. They didn't come back.

"I'm not you."

Derek snarls. "You think we're that different?"

Stiles turns to the side, hides behind his scarred eye. "I know we are."

Derek leans in, says low and furious, "The only difference between us, Stilinski, is that I'm on top of you and you're under me."

"Not forever." Stiles shoves at him, again when Derek doesn't budge. "Not forever, I won't be."

"And then?" Derek asks. "What will you do then?"

Stiles looks away again, at the window. He sets his jaw, implacable. "Nothing."

\+ + +

The drop comes. It's Chris.

Derek smells him as he descends the staircase down to Derek's rooms, but Stiles only gets it when the door opens. He doesn't say anything this time, but Stiles jerks up like he does.

"Chris!" His voice rasps.

Chris doesn't look over, doesn't even pause in unpacking the box.

"Chris?" Stiles tries again. Nothing. He looks around, squinting, like Gerard is lurking in the sightline of his dead eye. But it's just the two men Chris brought with him, faceless as the rest.

Stiles waves at him. "Hey, asshole, I'm talking to you."

"Shut up," says one of the men.

Stiles sizes him up, swallows. He turns back to Chris. When he speaks he sounds years younger. "Yo. Chris."

Chris does look, finally—once and then away, dismissive, like Stiles is a noisy bee.

"We're done here," he says—to his men.

They leave.

Stiles stares at the door where they were. He doesn't seem to notice when Derek unties him.

Derek puts some of the supplies in their proper place: toilet paper, toothpaste, razors in the bathroom, books in the main room, food in the fridge. There's more food than usual again, for Stiles, new bandages and disinfectants.

Stiles doesn't move while the entire time.

Derek had known early on that he wasn't the only survivor of the fire, when he'd overheard someone teasing Kate for letting two of the Hale pack slip through her fingers. One of them was his uncle, a born survivor. The other was Laura—his best friend since he could walk, and almost certainly the new Alpha now that his mom was dead.

It took a long time to realize that wherever Laura was, she wasn't coming back.

He'd only put it together that his uncle must have killed her when Peter was finally captured. Derek never had a chance to talk to him before they fought, and he was too drugged during the fight to think about anything but killing him. He'll never know why Peter killed her—if she was dying already and gave it to him somehow, if he tore her throat out when she wasn't looking. 

More importantly, he'll never know when it happened: if Peter killed her a week after the fire, while she was planning Derek's rescue, or if they had already spent years together, unaware or uncaring that he was in a cage.

It doesn't matter now. 

"It doesn't have to be so bad, you know," Derek says after an hour of dead silence.

Stiles looks up, uncomprehending.

"You just have to—stop waiting," Derek says, as gently as he knows how. "No one is coming for you. There's nothing except here."

"Scott is still coming for me," Stiles insists, unyielding.

"Then they'll capture him, and he'll die too."

Stiles looks paper thin, unsound. Derek takes hold of him, draws him down into the bed.  
He wishes he could take even this pain from him.

\+ + +

Two weeks later, the full moon returns.

So does Kate.

\+ + +

By the time she arrives Derek has torn new scars into the concrete on the floor of the cage. The room hazes red, the red floor and the red bed, where Stiles is tense in the corner. Derek needs out, the wet night grass and the wet night hunt. The moon is looming over him, whirling and magnetic, and Kate is coming down the stairs, outside the door. She's caught McCall or killed him, so she'll be happy, ready to let him out just to watch him trot back to her hand.

Then she opens the door, and Derek sees her manic face. There's a box in one hand that smells like rust. In her other hand's a gun.

"Stay out of the way," Derek warns, not looking at Stiles.

"Where am I gonna go?" Stiles mutters.

"That's the spirit," Kate says, smiling down at Stiles, gun almost loose in her hand. The box is a big one, perched against her hip like a baby.

Derek doesn't like her looking at him. "What's in the box?"

"A present for you," Kate says slowly, still staring at Stiles. "From junior here."

"But I want it from you." He's lying. Nothing good smells like rust.

Kate aims the gun at him, unlocks the cage door. "Come on out, puppy."

When he obeys, she nods at Stiles. "Now untie him."

He does that too. She tosses him a pair of handcuffs—custom made, unbreakable—and nods at the cage. "Lock yourself to one of the bars, hands above your head."

This time she keeps the gun aimed at Stiles. Derek knows from painful experience that she can fire before he can get to her, even from only a few feet away. 

Even remembering that, he's tempted, hates the way Stiles' hunching under the gun.

He ties himself to the cage.

When Stiles is standing, Kate sends the bucket skidding over to him, watches while Stiles opens it with shaky hands. It's filled with knives, but not Kate's regular stock. Most of them look old, unedged.

Stiles gapes at her. "What, am I supposed to pick one?"

"No." Kate stretches the word out. "You think one little knife is going to do anything to an Alpha? You're supposed to pick a _couple_."

"Or what?"

Kate's expression doesn't change. "Or I'll hurt you."

"You're already going to hurt me."

"True." Kate tilts her head, the way she does before she gets creative. "But maybe I'll find that redhead Allison is always following around too. What was her name—Lisa? Linda? Pretty girl. Sad to see her burn."

"Don't you freaking _touch_ her," Stiles snarls.

Derek hates her, whoever she is.

"Get to it, sugar lump."

Stiles picks up a knife with his right hand.

"Good," Kate purrs. "Do a good job and I'll let you see your friend one last time before we kill him."

"What's to stop me from sticking you with one of these?"

Kate tsks. "You sound like Derek when he first showed up. Derek, honey, why don't you explain why we don't fight?"

"Things will never get better," Derek repeats dully, eyes on the ground, remembering. "They can always get worse."

"Worse like what?" Kate prompts.

Derek shrugs. "Fire."

"Exactly," Kate agrees, voice sinuous. "Now tell me, little man: do you want to stab the animal who's been torturing you for two months, or do you want to burn?"

Stiles switches the knife to his left hand—his good one.

"Good boy."

Derek hates Stiles for that.

"Now," Kate continues, "Here's how this is gonna work. Stilinski, every knife in him is a minute with your friend. Derek, honey, if you resist—if you so much as scratch him—I'll kill him right now, no skin off my back."

"You're going to kill him anyway," Derek says cautiously—asking.

Kate raises her eyebrows. "Says who?"

Derek lies back and holds onto that thought: McCall dead, Stiles his forever, with nothing to think about or miss but him. It physically hurts to be still now, blood pumping, muscles seizing in his jaw and his body and his sharp boned fingers. The room hazes red.

He takes a deep breath, stares at the ceiling. 

It's harder when Stiles kneels in front of him, the way he smells and his knobby knees against Derek's so familiar. He can feel Stiles looking at him, deciding where the knife would do the least damage.

He smells so good. Derek starts drooling, teeth long. He has to get free, to run away, to open up Stiles' soft belly and gorge. Stiles leans in close and Derek grinds his teeth. It's agony even before the pain starts, cramping low in his gut, in his neck where the hair prickles. Stiles is panting, reeking of panic, heart thudding until Derek is dizzy with it. 

"Do it," he snaps.

Stiles' breath lurches out of him, and he jerks forward. The knife skitters off his ribs and lands low, in his side.

It's agony. His body wants to heal around it, runs up against the sharp edges over and over and can't. There's a hole in him and he can't fix it and it _hurts_ and it feels familiar. It happens again. Again.

Derek whines. It's like being shot slowly, a constant brutal reminder of just how unreal he is.

"Remember, Derek—if you hurt him, I'll kill him."

"I remember," he grits out.

Stiles shoves another knife in him.

Derek leans over, coughs up blood. He can't see anything but red, can't hear anything but a wet rattle. Stiles sticks him again, and then it's nothing but the buzzing in his ears. He's dizzy, lights behind his eyes. He wants to throw up. It hurts so much and he can't make it stop. He's growling, his whole body seizing. His belly is on fire, like he's swallowed it, and he's choking and he can smell blood and organ bile and there's _meat_ in front of him and it's hurting him.

His hand is free suddenly, and he flies forward, fully changed by the time he's on top of Stiles, one hand yanked back behind him but the other cracked and bleeding around Stiles' throat. He tightens his hold, needs to crush this thing that's hurting him, leans down to bite him. There's blood pouring out on the floor, onto Stiles' pale face. He's sprawled out on the floor, one hand defensively on Derek's hand on his neck and the other stretched out and scrabbling. He smells so good—everything hurts so much but he smells so fucking good and Derek is going to eat him.

A sudden slice in the soft skin on the inside of his elbow. He rears back, hissing, and Stiles charges forward at the same time. He stabs Derek in the stomach, so savage Derek's head crashes back against the bars, and when he can see again it's Stiles on top of him. He pulls the knife out and stabs him again and again and again and it _hurts_ —like acid in his chest, in his stomach, in his shredded guts.

Stiles grabs him by his hair, tilts his head back, and plunges the knife in his eye.

He screams. The pain flairs and then the knife is gone. When he can look up again, squinting through one eye, Kate is in front of him, Stiles sprawled on his back where she's thrown him. Kate is aiming the gun at Stiles again, takes Derek's jaw with the other. 

"This is all your fault," she says, expressionless. It's the blankness back again, the way she gets when she watches him sometimes for days on end. Her hair is dull in the unforgiving light. He whimpers.

"It is," he wheezes, trying to please, to get her attention, wanting the barrel of the gun aimed back at him. She's coated in red and he can't tell if he's changed or it's blood or maybe it's her. Kate is red if she's any color.

"I kept my end of the deal." Stiles says from his corner.

Derek coughs suddenly, spews blood, wonders if he's going to die before his lungs can mend. He can't heal around a knife in his flesh, doesn't have the strength to push them out. His freed hand bleeds sluggishly, drips into the spreading dark puddle on the floor while the healing skin crawls over his wounds. 

By the time he stops coughing, they're gone.

\+ + +

"Derek."

He blinks. It's Stiles, he realizes fuzzily.

"Derek."

His name sounds funny in Stiles' mouth. It takes Derek a long breath to figure out why.

He's never said Derek's name before.

"Derek." Stiles slaps his face. Derek blinks, grunts when it jostles the wound in his face. "Shit, hey, it's me—it's Stiles. I'm gonna take the knives out. Don't bite."

He can't bite. He remembers that blurry day at the doctor, Kate's hands in his hair.

Stiles' hands are colder, wider—gentler, even when he pulls the first knife out.

Derek sucks in his breath, whimpering unchecked.

The wounds heal slowly at first, then faster as more and more knives clatter back into the bucket. His blood remakes itself, flutters through veins reconnected, muscle begin to knit back together.

Knife after knife, into the bucket. 

Kate is waiting for him when they're all out, unlocks him herself and pulls him by his collar up to his unsteady feet. He stares down at Stiles, who isn't even looking at him. He's covered in blood, smells like another werewolf—McCall. Even so, he smells amazing. Derek may never see him again.

He should have eaten him when he had the chance.

\+ + +

Upstairs, in Kate's room, she pushes them both into the bed, has barely tied him up before she's sprawled next to him. She's stiller than he's ever seen her.

Derek hates it.

"You caught McCall," he prompts.

Kate begins to his collar aimlessly, runs her hands over the deep bruises where the wounds are still healing. He hisses, flinches away before he can help it and is shocked when Kate stops, flattens her callused palm soft against him. He looks up, but she hasn't gone away again, no emptiness in her expression. She looks—tired. Her makeup is smudged.

"Found him with Allison." Kate rubs her eyebrow. "My stupid baby girl."

"What are they going to do to him?"

Kate huffs. "Probably the same thing they did last time. Piece of cake for a big healthy boy like you."

Derek says nothing.

She'd told him it was going to be a piece of cake then too. He would have known she was lying even if she hadn't pushed him to his knees for one last use of him before the match. The danger was the point: Gerard was too subtle to shoot him outright, but sticking him in an unwinnable fight was just his style. Either he'd die or kill his own kin. Both outcomes put him in his place, with Gerard firmly on top.

Where does that leave Stiles?

Kate starts to stroke his stomach, still that same unpainful palm. "Do you think your uncle came back here just for you?"

"I don't know."

She pinches him. "Guess."

"It's possible. Pack is stronger when it's family. But he would have known it was stupid to come back."

Kate is quiet for a long time, her breathing slow but awake. When she speaks her voice is toneless, "If you had died, none of this would have happened."

"Peter would still have been free," Derek points out carefully.

"But he would have stayed away. Never bitten Vicky, never changed McCall. He and Allison could have been friends."

Stiles wouldn't have had to help McCall escape—would never have been captured himself.

But Kate doesn't care about Stiles, and definitely not about McCall. She'd been furious about Victoria, but that didn't explain why she was bringing it up now.

It's Allison, he realizes, and goes cold. 

Risking him in the first fight had been a message for Kate too. She was the one who'd let Peter go free, and Peter was the one who'd bitten Victoria. Kate was too good a hunter to destroy, but her pet wasn't. Derek wonders if Gerard had expected him to win the fight at all. He had assumed Gerard was the kind of man who accounted for every possible, had planned to win whether Derek won or not, but now it doesn't seem right. His uncle had been the Alpha, and a man known to survive even the worst odds.

And that—his own unavoidable death in the fight—had been Kate's punishment for Gerard's daughter-in-law. Derek wonders what Gerard will do now that his granddaughter is the fallen one: helping a fugitive, in love with a werewolf.

Derek ventures, "I'm sure she'll be forgiven."

Kate's hands move restless over his chest. "I should have killed you when I had the chance."

\+ + +

The fight is in a new place this time.

It looks like only a makeshift arena: it's only a portion of the local lacrosse field hemmed in by fencing on the top and sides. The fencing, however, is electrocuted, and they fill in a line of mountain ash behind him as they shuffle him towards the arena. The veterinarian, Dr. Deaton, injects him as he goes into the cage separating the ring from the audience. He crouches in it, waiting for the drug to kick in. His muzzle is controlled by remote, and clicks off as he shuffles his weight back and forth. He tears it off, stretching his jaw, trying not to think about anything.

Allison is chained up in the middle of the ring. 

McCall is with Stiles. Stiles' hands are tied behind his back but he's still pressed up against the bars, cheeks mashed. Scott reaches out for him, and Derek thinks it's to push him away until he sees black lines limp up McCall's hand. The last few seconds before his death, and he's spending them taking Stiles' pain.

Derek locks that fact away. He can't remember the last few sober moments before he'd killed his uncle. In time he'll forget this too.

They pull Stiles away, and then the gates open. Derek lopes forward, claws out and head lowered. 

If he wins, Kate will be happy with him. 

He waits for his brain to dim, for the world to narrow. He circles McCall warily, smelling him, staring only at him. He has to kill him—only him. If he only kills him, Gerard will be forced to say it's good training rather than admit he was outsmarted. Allison will live and Kate will be pleased and she'll give him Stiles. He waits for the drug to kick in and thinks that he can't bite, he can't bite, only McCall.

He doesn't remember how long it took for the drugs to kick in last time, the wolfsbane stretching out into his memory and snatching bits and pieces around the fight. He doesn't remember much before the arena. It could have been seconds or minutes circling his uncle, seeing him alive for the last time, wondering when he had become an Alpha. It feels like a sober eternity now. He wants it to be over, won't charge before it starts. Maybe the dose is too low for an Alpha—but McCall hasn't changed either, is barely changed. His teeth are longer, but bared only hesitantly. His eyes are yellow, but clear.

The wolfsbane is having no effect.

Suddenly, the doors to the stadium burst open. 

A flood of people rush in—Derek can see sheriff department uniforms, a woman in hospital scrubs with a rifle. In the arena, McCall is tearing the handcuffs off of Allison, pulling her to her feet.

Still stunned, Derek watches dazed as Chris draws his gun, aiming at the other hunters. Deaton is opening the door to the arena, two felled men behind him and a bow and quiver in his hand. McCall and Allison run for the door, Allison grabbing her bow just as two other hunters come down to the cage to try to corral them. She shoots them so quickly they fall without a sound—or maybe Derek doesn't hear it. All he can hear is a whining white noise, and everything around him is so red.

 _Stiles_.

Derek pounds out of the arena, up through the bleachers instead of through the fray of battle at the doors. He can smell bodies everywhere, dizzying after so many years of so few. There are some guns, gunshot whines—but some of the attackers only have baseball bats, a poker. There's screaming everywhere, too many people's blood.

Then Derek smells Stiles'.

He turns, sees Stiles apart from the rest where Gerard had gone after him, cornered him away from the knot of everyone else. Stiles is clutching his stomach, bent over. There's blood dripping from his hand, a steady pool into the floor.

Gerard turns, must feel Derek watching. He smiles at him, smug. His mouth moves, but there's only silence, a high pale whine.

Derek leaps. Gerard raises his hands, one forearm to protect his throat, the other raised with the gun aimed where Derek will launch. But Derek isn't aiming there.

He tears into Gerard's belly, hears the bullet sear out above him.

Fat and blood spew into his mouth immediately, but he bites until he tastes savage stomach acid. Blood coats his muzzle, his eyes. Guts sprawl out all over the ground, but Derek keeps going, mashing his jaws down until he hits bone. He rocks suddenly, his body hit, but he doesn't care. The bone is there, and he won't let it go until it crumbles under his strong teeth, his indomitable jaws. He worries out gristle and skin until his nose mashes into mud. Only then does he finally lift his head, panting.

Gerard has been chewed in half. 

Derek snorts out blood.

Gerard is finally lying dead on the ground, pale and still and so much meat.

Derek leans down, teeth bared—

"Derek!"

He freezes.

Stiles is lying on the ground, the grass around him muddy with blood. Derek is at his side in one leap, leans down with his mouth and soaks up blood and pain until he can't see anymore. All he can hear is Stiles' thready heartbeat, his rattling breaths. All he can feel is the hand Stiles rests on him, on the back of his head—his palm warm against the top of Derek's neck, his fingers stretching all the way to the soft skin behind his ear.

By the time they come for him, Stilinski's heartbeat is steady—and Derek is no longer an Alpha.

\+ + +

They take him to the sheriff's office with the other imprisoned hunters. The others go to the cells, while he sits in the interrogation room, bound with unbreakable Argent handcuffs. He hasn't been anywhere without being drugged, leashed or electrified in years. He's still raw from changing back into this body, from leaving it in the first place. The lights are searing, the voices a cacophony, too much smell everywhere. He catches hold of Stiles' scent somewhere in the station and grips it, head bent against the light.

Derek needs to talk to him.

He can hear him now too, shouting. He smells tears, and then the door to the interrogation room crashes open. The sheriff charges through. He stops when he sees Derek, but Derek knows what he's going to do.

His fist hits Derek's jaw hard enough to send him crashing to the ground.

The sheriff follows him down, hits him over and over. It hurts, but it gives him something to focus on besides the terrifying expanse of the world outside his rooms.

"Monster," the sheriff is shouting. "How could you—you fucking _monster_ —"

Another blow to the head, followed by the gentle splat of tears. 

He's going to pass out soon.

"Dad, stop!"

Another blow, and then Stiles is pulling the sheriff away. The sheriff wipes his hand roughly over his eyes, chest heaving. They look at him when he coughs wetly, standing side by side.

"Where's Kate?" he asks. They both turn to look at him.

For a long moment neither of them say anything, their eyes widening the same way, mouths opening the same way. Derek hates them dully, how similar they are.

"See?" Stiles barks, turning to his father, gesturing wildly. "That kind of fucked up."

"Christ." The sheriff rubs his eyes with one hand. "Come on."

They go outside the room, but then continue to talk, as if unaware that Derek can still hear them.

"What he did to you, it's—"

"Yeah, I was _there_ , Dad, I know what he did."

"I—look, I don't want to fight," his father says. He sighs wetly. "Come on. We both need to sleep."

They leave, footsteps slowly fading.

Derek swallows blood and thinks about sleep.

The sheriff's department brings him some protein bars and Gatorade. He hasn't had it since before he was taken. It floods him with memory at the first sip: summers at the pool, Kate beautiful in her bathing suit, the way her lifeguard whistle had fallen so tantalizingly between her breasts. 

He had loved that whistle in that one golden summer, her hand down his PJs.

He swallows that too.

\+ + +

They take him to one of the cells and uncuff him. There's a shaky line of mountain ash drawn along the front of the cell, but the rest of the walls are breakable concrete. Derek goes lightheaded at the thought of breaking them down, has to sit with his knees pulled up until the feeling goes away.

Dr. Deaton visits him the next day. He's a Druid, and he remembers Derek's mother. He's been doing everything in his power to help McCall.

"They're deciding what to do with you now," Deaton begins. "There are a few people who don't trust you."

"They want to kill me." Kate used to tell him they would, if they ever found out he had survived.

Deaton is unfazed. "Some do."

"Would you do it?"

"What do you think should happen?"

"When has that ever mattered?"

Deaton does not reply.

Derek asks, "Where's Kate?"

"She died in the fight. She was shot -- by Allison Argent."

 _My stupid baby girl_ , Derek remembers. He wonders if Kate had even defended herself..

Then Deaton says, "Derek, I—I need to apologize."

Derek looks up, frowning.

Deaton clasps his hands behind his back. "If you had any chance of escaping, you had to overcome the wolfsbane. I tried to be as quick as—I'm sorry."

"No one has ever figured out an antidote."

Deaton clears his throat. "I had a theory—werewolves concentrate more of their energy on healing in proportion to their wounds. The greater the injury, the greater their abilities. So—as an Alpha, if you were severely injured, then you might be able to overcome even wolfsbane. It won't last—I had to gamble that there wouldn't be another big dose before the fight."

That makes sense, and also meant Deaton took a risk. Slipping that by Kate would have been difficult, and if he had died Kate would have been furious.

But now she's dead.

"Thank you."

Deaton's heartbeat speeds up. "I thought you'd be angrier."

"I'm not angry."

"What are you, then?" Deaton's voice is soft, gentle even, but he watches Derek intently for the answer. 

He won't be able to tell if Derek's lying.

Derek tells the truth: "I don't know."

\+ + +

Could he have saved Kate if he had been there?

He remembers the way she would empty out sometimes. The first time it happened, he mistook it for distracted, leapt at her claws out from as close as he could get. He'd paid for it with a bullet. He can't remember much after that: sickening pain, his skin jaundiced, ugly black veins spreading up his arm, too weak even to gnaw his own arm off. 

He had pleaded with her to fix it, but she hadn't heard. She barely seemed to notice he'd been shot, bare feet slipping on the blood as she followed him around. 

She'd finally snapped out of it after nearly two days.

In the end she'd slapped him until he was conscious enough to explain what had happened, what the antidote was. She'd burned a bullet over the stove and left the ash.

She'd saved his life.

The last time it happened was with the knives, when she knelt over him. She'd thrown Stiles off of him, protected his body with her body.

He hadn't even thought about her.

He wishes Stiles was with him.

He doesn't know what he'd do if he was.

\+ + +

He's staring at the ceiling feverish when someone else comes to his cell. For a second he mistakes the footsteps, the teenage sweat.

But it's only McCall. He doesn't walk the same way at all, Derek sees now. He moves like a werewolf, smells like one.

McCall's arms are crossed over his heaving chest. His jaw is crooked, hair pushed uncertainly to one side.

"Stiles told me to come here," he says, sullen. His eyes flash yellow. "He says you're not a threat anymore."

"Not to him." Derek squares his shoulders, wonders if McCall wants a fight.

"There's some people who want to kill you," McCall continues. "I don't think that's right but I'd leave you in here forever."

He's handsome, Derek can see, even behind his high school plush. Stiles talked about him so much, held him up like a shield. Derek wonders what he says about him now, now that he's with McCall and away from Derek.

"What does he want?"

"How could you do that to him?" McCall asks. "How could you hurt him like that?"

Derek thinks back to that first night, remembers Kate's taunts and her gun. He remembers the morning after, strapped down to Deaton's table and whining for Kate, begging her to hurt him instead. "Because it was familiar."

"But why? He could have helped you."

"He did."

"But he could have—all you did was hurt him." McCall is vibrating, voice low and taut.

"I did."

"That's all you have to say?"

Derek thinks for a time. "If Allison shot your parents and locked you in her basement for six years, do you think you'd still be friends with Stiles?"

"I think I'd want a friend more than ever."

Everyone thinks that. "Go away."

Derek is tired. He lies back down on the bench. 

He hears McCall shift behind him. "Stiles was right about you."

He leaves.

It takes Derek a restless while to sift out the tone in his words. It's been a long time since he heard it. It smells like when he held Stiles' cheek and Stiles stared up at him unnameably.

He can't remember what it is.

\+ + +

If you build a strong enough cage, it can lock up everything— even an Alpha, even the world.

Derek has had so much practice being locked up. Now that he's free the memories come back only in spurts, like that painful summer he grew an inch.

He was in high school when his life burned down. He was just starting to think about college. His mom wanted him close by, hoped for Berkeley but would have settled for USF. He'd been thinking maybe UCLA. He'd driven down to LA with Laura one time, when she'd kidnapped him for a weekend. They'd gone to the beach, drummed with the drum circle hippies down in Venice Beach, been chased out by the cops at sunset. They'd drunk all night in the street, fearless.

He had a favorite pizza place he used to go to after school: two slices of ham and pineapple, giant thing of coke, home in time for dinner. His mother would smell it on his breath, teased him about eating so much. _You're a growing boy, I guess,_ she'd said, always a funny tang to it.

She'd been sad when she said it, he sees now. Because he wasn't as small as he once had been. Because she wouldn't get that time back.

He hasn't seen a movie in six years.

He remembers being curled up in the bed with Stiles, in the cold damp womb of his rooms.

It's a fair trade, he thinks. He'd trade it again: his cage, his rooms, his boxed up life, just to hold Stiles again.

He won't, maybe not ever again.

The weight of that presses down on him, on his head and his chest and his thighs and his belly.

\+ + +

He's almost relieved when Chris shows up. Chris walks crisply down the hall, the way he always has to Derek's cell.

At least he's familiar.

He stands in front of the bars with his arms crossed. "They were talking about voting to let you live, before. It's not now. But I would have voted to let you live, if we had."

Derek sits up.

Another of Chris's mercies by absence. He's never tortured Derek himself, never even ordered it.

"McCall's in charge now?"

Chris raises his head, stares down at him with his flat inscrutable eyes. He's never looked at Derek for this long before. "Scott and Allison. They're the ones who planned the attack. Deaton and a few other Druids are starting to coordinate. I'm not — I'll help my daughter. But they're leaving your fate to Stiles."

This is familiar too: his life in the hands of someone who might be cruel to him, Chris nearby and glaring.

"If they let you live, and you do get out — if you _ever_ hurt my daughter, I will kill you."

Derek raises his eyebrows. "I'm not the one who tried to kill her."

Chris looks away. "I know you killed my father."

"Your sister killed mine, if that makes you feel any better."

"It doesn't."

Derek shrugs.

Then Chris says: "I should have done something. About my sister—about the part I played. All of it."

His heartbeat doesn't change, truthful fast.

"She was always my father's favorite, for better or worse. And I got used to justifying what she was doing, told myself she'd earned it. And I wish I could say seeing you—hurt—changed my mind in the end, but—you can tell when I'm lying."

The words sound rehearsed. 

Derek had given up on the future a long time ago—until Stiles. And now Chris is admitting that he had too. Derek wonders for a second when Chris started to plot rebellion, but as soon as he thinks it he knows the answer.

_Stiles?_

How Derek had hated it then.

Chris looks at him. In the harsh light he looks older, like time has sped up—or started again after a long lull. "I'm sorry, Derek. I don't expect your forgiveness."

Derek feels the way he used to five years ago, when Kate cut his clothes off.

Chris smells the way McCall had, the way Stiles had that once. 

Derek remembers, unwilling, the first time he killed a deer while hunting. He'd seen the blood on his muzzle, followed the trail back to the carcass. It had been a buck, young. He'd stood over it. He remembers the mist and the mud and the bloody tracks away from the body, its guts ripped out and its glassy fly-ridden eyes. He'd felt something then.

The smell is pity.

The stink of it lingers like a scar.

Derek howls.

\+ + +

It's not the roar of an Alpha, the rising call of a Beta, or even the supernatural loneliness of an Omega. It's a sad old dog bawl, and he's sitting red on the concrete floor. He howls for all the dead he couldn't mourn. He howls for mourning, for whatever else he's forgotten. He's cut out so many pieces of himself, and he cannot expect to get them back.

When he opens his eyes, Stiles is looming over him.

Derek's changed again. Then in a frittering second he's not anymore, cold on the prison floor.

Derek remembers a thousand times someone stood over him, the precious handful when he stood over Stiles.

Stiles is holding out a glass of water. Derek's throat is raw and dry. He takes it. 

Their fingers never touch.

\+ + +

He sits across from Derek in the interrogation room. They haven't leashed him, haven't even locked the door. The sheriff is just down the hall, smells like he's eating hot grease, rank with worry. Stiles had nodded to the two men who had escorted him into the room, and they had left with all but a salute.

Stiles' eye looks better, less puffy. He's had more to eat, and not the stale bread and old eggs that Derek had been feeding him.

Derek wishes he could touch Stiles. He wishes Stiles would touch him.

At least he's used to wishing. "What happens now?"

"Now you go."

Derek tenses.

He used to fantasize, back in the first dizzy year in the cage, about what it would be like to gain control. In his mind, Kate was always there, alive and his. In the first few months the scenario ended with him running away. He'd disappear into the woods, away for the rest of his life. Then, it turned into him killing her—tearing her head off, eating her heart. Then, as time dragged on, he fucked her instead, on top of her and in control while she begged.

Eventually the fantasy fragmented: Kate bleeding and riding his cock in the woods somewhere, in the fog.

Never had the scene ended with her letting him go.

"Go where?"

"That's up to you."

Derek shudders. "Why?"

Stiles half smiles. He's remembering too. "At least now you're asking why."

It hasn't mattered for the past six years, not if he wanted to live. But now? Uncertain, he asks a different question: "How did you know to go to that tree?"

"What?"

"That first night."

"That's what you've—" Stiles looks away, jaw clenching. He glances at the door, like he'll call the sheriff— like he'll leave.

"Please tell me," Derek adds. He wants Stiles to look at him. He wants to know.

"I don't know," Stiles says. He sounds so worn. And then after a long moment: "Something told me. I can't—I didn't know where to go and then I did. I had, like—I saw this tree stump, and then I saw the tree. Like it told me."

"A tree stump."

"Yeah, it was this image in my head all of a sudden. It was from a big tree. And it had these roots." Stiles starts to wave his arms, spread them wide to show the roots. He has broad shoulders, Derek realizes. He will be big some day. Maybe bigger than Derek.

 _We're stronger in Beacon Hills_ , his mother used to say, and looked to the trees.

The tree had chosen Stiles.

"There's no stump like that on the property."

Kate's estate had been his home for less time than any other—barely five years, nothing compared to how long he'd lived in his mother's house. But its paths linger closer in his memories. He can't remember other places, other trees.

"I guess you'd know."

"I'll find it." It wouldn't be far. He wouldn't go far. "When I go. See what it tells me."

He knows what it will say. It saved Stiles once, gave him to Derek. Now it will give Derek to him.

"Good." Stiles nods once, then again, hands drumming over the desk. 

"Aren't you going to warn me not to hurt anyone?" Chris had. Deaton had asked, in his roundabout way. It was why they were thinking of killing him.

Stiles stills at him. "I know you, Derek. I mean, I probably know you now better than anyone else alive."

Derek nods—which seems to startle Stiles, like he was expecting an argument.

"And you did awful things to me," Stiles continues, voice cutting out in the middle of the sentence, and then strengthening. "And the worst part is I know why you did them."

He remembers Stiles on top of him, the knife in his hand.

"I won't do it again."

Wolves, when they kill, always tear into the guts first, chewing through fat and bilious organs, eat their prey from the soft parts up until blood spurts into their eyes and ears. Derek doesn't do anything by halves.

"I know you won't," Stiles says, barely above a whisper. "I'll make sure of it."

He'd eat the whole world for Stiles.

\+ + +

Three months later, Derek lopes in wide circles around Beacon Hills.

He can go wherever he wants now, anywhere in the world, but he'll stay here. The war is coming. They're going to need every wolf they can find, and Derek has memorized the face and scent of dozens of different hunters during his imprisonment.

Stiles knows it. Stiles let him live.

Eventually, someone will come to find him. It could be McCall, or the Argent girl, maybe Deaton. They'll appeal to his principles, to his sense of self-preservation, to his need for vengeance. But he'll come for Stiles. He'd do anything for Stiles now.

Stiles probably knows that, too.

He turns back towards the town, spirals in tighter and tighter concentric circles until he's narrowed to one neighborhood, one block, one well worn path around one particular house. They never hear him coming but they must know he's there. Maybe they don't care. 

Or maybe Stiles has told them to look the other way.

He's slowed to a trot, then a walk, then a final circle as he settles in front of Stiles' door.

One day it will open.

Stiles will ask for him in his smallest voice, the one only Derek has ever heard. Derek will come in, into the place that smells like Stiles. Traces of the rest of the world have left their mark on the rooms: letters on the kitchen table, pictures on the walls, bits of dirt visitors have dragged into the house, the lingering hint of perfume, the glass they've left half full in the sink. The windows will all be open.

There's no cage in the house—only Stiles' bed.

Derek will curl up at the foot of it. Weight will slough off him with each exhale, miles and miles off of his shoulders, until he's floating.

And maybe someday after that, Derek will close his eyes tight as Stiles reaches down, lax and careless, to scratch behind Derek's ears.

Then he'll sleep.


End file.
